Launch HN: Voygr (YC W26) – A better maps API for agents and AI apps (ycombinator.com)

45 points by ymarkov 4 hours ago

24 comments:

by bravura 2 hours ago

Bog-standard LLM mapping is terrible and I recently added Google Maps to my personal agent to remediate this.

I'd love to try Voygr for fun. Is there a skill defined that I could just swap in Voygr

by ymarkov an hour ago

Google also doesn't tell you if a place exists - it just returns the list of possible places which it thinks could be relevant. We have instructions defined for agents to onboard https://github.com/voygr-tech/dev-tools

by acombandrew 4 hours ago

This is a great idea, albeit one that will be really hard to pull off well but really valuable for developers if you're able to execute.

Definitely kind of a boil-the-ocean high-schlep startup but I would love to see this succeed.

by ymarkov 4 hours ago

Thanks, it is going to be fun! :)

by maelito an hour ago

I'm not sure I understand : how can you product help for opening times or pictures of my local boulangerie ? What kind of data sources will help you automate the reviewing of its attributes ?

by ymarkov an hour ago

We are not providing opening times yet - we just check if place is permanently closed or not. But it is in the works under our experimental enrichment API (which is not yet open to public)

by wipfli 8 minutes ago

I started scraping restaurant websites in Zürich and extracted and hand-checked opening hours in the OpenStreetMap format. The goal is to build a corpus for evaluation purposes which maps website texts to correct opening hours strings for all restaurants in Switzerland. Maybe you can use that to benchmark your own hours extracting system... https://github.com/wipfli/opening-hours/

by amir_karbasi 3 hours ago

Really cool! We're currently using map and web searches in our agent to gather this info for our tool. Does it support an approximate address? For example, if a plaza can have multiple street numbers, do I need to make a request for each possible address or would it find a certain business with an approximate address?

by ymarkov 3 hours ago

Thanks! Our initial API works as follows - you provide POI/business name and its address and we are telling you if it exists or not. So if you are looking to check if the plaza is existing, you just need to provide its supposed address. If it is a business within plaza, then an address of that business is required

by amir_karbasi 2 hours ago

Let me rephrase my question. How exact must the address input be? Do I need to include unit numbers? What if the street number is off by a few due to the layout of a plaza?

Using Maps or Web Search APIs, I can find approximate locations for certain businesses based on my input. Can your API work in a similar manner?

by ymarkov 31 minutes ago

It is supposed to work if you even don't include unit number or a house number is a bit off. We analyze other signals too, so if the address is a bit off, the API is still supposed to mark a place as existing

by il 4 hours ago

I like the agent-first signup via API. Is this meant to be distributed as an agent skill?

by ymarkov 4 hours ago

Indeed, in the current age we need to build things for agents first. We think that the skills will primarily will be discovered through marketplaces or via web search

by teepo an hour ago

Why not go with V'ger? Seems like a missed opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_characters_(...

by ymarkov 21 minutes ago

Indeed, we've been told about that. Hopefully, it won't be a defining moment for us as a company :)

by frankdenbow 3 hours ago

Implementing maps into our app so giving this a shot. How does pricing compare to google maps api?

by ymarkov 3 hours ago

It is on par with Google Maps API, but Google gives you more data. Our terms of service are more flexible - for instance we don't require attribution and deleting our data past 30 days. And we are actively working on adding more info to our APIs

by thesiti92 3 hours ago

what kinds of data quality evals do you guys use now? i'm curious to try integrating it

by ymarkov 3 hours ago

We are using judges with LLMs and web grounding plus manual grading. We recently did a benchmark on the LLM quality across major AI providers - we plan to open source it soon and will probably open source our API quality check benchmark too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366423

by macrolet 4 hours ago

Who are your customers? Consumer or business?

by ymarkov 4 hours ago

Both - we're building APIs ultimately designed for AI agents and LLMs that need trustworthy place data and that includes cases from enterprise to personal people's agents

by deepdarkforest 3 hours ago

Its quite funny that you are building an "infinite place profile", you both worked on products used by 100s of millions of people, and yet your website is down from 45 minutes of HN traffic!

Joking, but its a very good idea. Synchronization between the physical world information and digital has been a very hard problem for decades and im sure an agentic approach can 10x the value.

by ymarkov 3 hours ago

Thanks! Was it truly down? I have checked and I don't see any disruptions

by dk8996 2 hours ago

We work in this space and have found that, very often, the realities on the ground do not match the digital information, especially when it comes to geospatial data, where businesses exist, what businesses actually exist, and their status. At Rwazi, we have millions of users helping collect on-the-ground data.

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