Devlog #2 still sticking to the bi-weekly schedule!

This entry will outline new core features added as well as highlight a couple quality of life improvements and give a quick update on where development focus will be next.

New Feature: Web Wiki & Note Management

As I've been building out Canis one thing I've been grappling with is how to best motivate users to take notes. Note-taking is the lifeblood of the system, feeding the Community Notes knowledge base which I see as the foundation for Canis. Capturing the sort of experiential data that doesn't make it to traditional wikis or guides is the main value add.

With this in mind, I made a post on r/ArcRaidersGuides to get feedback on what would motivate users to post notes and keep Canis' novel data flywheel in motion. I got some great feedback through comments and DM's which outlined 2 main motivators:

1. A place to explore notes outside of just interacting with Canis via text or voice
2. The ability to publish individual notes with attribution

The first piece of feedback was expected and if anyone had viewed our roadmap on the about page before they would have seen that the Star Chart Wiki has been on the to-do list since the beginning. The second motivating factor was more of a surprise. However, after some more thought, the ability to publish individual notes and see your username attached does provide a sense of accomplishment and value that the current aggregated and anonymized Community Notes system does not enable.

With that feedback in mind we set out to create these new features, and I'm very happy to announce in this post the launch of our Star Chart Wiki and our Field Notes Management page!

Star Chart Wiki

The first new addition is the web based Star Chart Wiki. This wiki is available via our site at canis.gg/wiki and allows users to explore all of the game entities Canis has stored in its knowledge base, viewing Community and User Published Notes for each. Apart from the User Published Notes, which we'll get into in the next section, all of this data is what Canis utilizes to answer user queries in Discord, the web wiki just adds a new method of surfacing this information. The goal here is to give users insight into how the knowledge base is growing as well as provide a new avenue to drive users to Canis. The web wiki provides hundreds of new pages which as the wiki is built out can drive search traffic to Canis and creates a new avenue for user discovery.

At the time of this post, if you walk through the wiki you will see it is still quite bare. The value of Canis comes from users sharing their discoveries, the hope is that by surfacing what data Canis has at its disposal this can be a call to action for new users to share what they know!

You may notice some slight changes to the structure of the wiki over the coming weeks. We're actively adding more game entities and working to structure them into different categories on the wiki to make for the best user experience.

Note Management

Along with the new web wiki we've also added a note management page to the website. Before this addition the only way to edit notes was via an interaction with Canis in Discord, which made for a clunky user experience and didn't give the fine-tuned control required to properly edit your notes.

We've now added the Field Notes page to the site to fix this! You can see in the screenshot below the page provides the ability to edit note content, re-link the note to the desired entities, and it gives the ability to Publish a note to the wiki.

Publishing a note posts it on each individual wiki page that note is linked to and provides attribution via your Discord handle. Other users can click into your user page to view all of your published notes.

An important callout is that published notes live on the wiki as community contributions. Community Notes, which power Canis' answers, are still built through the aggregation system to ensure accuracy. Perhaps in the future trusted users will be able to publish straight to Canis' knowledge base, but at the moment this introduces too much risk of incorrect information entering the system and feeding false answers to users.

To access your Field Notes you just need to login to the site using Discord, via the Sign In button on the nav-bar. Once signed in you can hover over your user profile to reveal the 'My Field Notes' button which will take you to your notes at canis.gg/notes

Feature Improvements

Quick note on a few feature improvements.

Wake Word Improvements

Continuing efforts to improve wake word detection consistency and accuracy. New updates have been pushed this week to more frequently reset the wake word spotter model, avoiding stale states and greatly improving accuracy after long stints of silence.

Intent Detection Accuracy

Looking at request data it seemed as though queries were incorrectly triggering the note and waypoint management intents when based on the query a user really just wanted to ask a query. The intent detection system has been altered to require more explicit mention of notes or waypoints to trigger this intent. This should lead to better intent detection for general user queries.

What's Next?

With the addition of the web wiki and the note management system I feel as though the core loop for Canis is complete and available to users. My goals now are shifting from purely development to a combination of bug fixes / feature improvements and increased marketing efforts. Canis only has value if there are users sharing their discoveries with one another. Up to this point, only word of mouth and a few Reddit posts have driven user traffic. With the core system built I'll now be focusing more effort on expanding the user base to help Canis reach its full potential.

Feedback about the performance of the system will still be handled as reports come in and bug fixes / feature improvements will continue in the background to provide everyone with the best experience possible.

P.S. First Founder!

Shoutout and big thank you to hintofcurry, our first user to upgrade to the Founder tier! While in Beta we are offering a Founder subscription tier which grants a higher monthly voice query balance. We will remain in Beta for the next couple of months but are looking to use early user data to develop a pricing strategy that best reflects how people are using Canis. We will continue offering the Founder tier during the beta, if you're interested in providing early support and locking in a lifetime guaranteed rate you can check it out at canis.gg/subscription!