Show HN: Zapier's first API

235 points

3 years ago

Hey HN! We launched Zapier way back in 2012 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138415 and thought we'd return home to announce something special and hopefully exciting :) We are trying to finally live up to the "API" in our name with Zapier's first universal API:

Natural Language Actions – https://zapier.com/l/natural-language-actions

API docs – https://nla.zapier.com/api/v1/docs

(to be fair, we have published APIs before that can access Zapier data, but never before one devs can use to directly call the 5k+ apps / 20k+ actions on our platform)

For example, you can use the API to:

  * Send messages in Slack
  * Retrieve a row in a Google Sheet
  * Draft a reply in Gmail
  * ... and thousands more actions with one universal API

We optimized NLA for use cases that receive user input in natural language (think chatbots, assistants, or any product/feature using LLMs) -- but not strictly required!

Folks have asked for an API for 10 years and I've always been slightly embarrassed we didn't have one. We hesitated because we did not want to pass along our universe of complexity to end devs. With the help of LLMs we found some cool patterns to deliver the API we always wanted.

My co-founder/CTO Bryan did an interview with Garry on YC blog with more details: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/building-apis-for-ai-an-int...

We also published a LangChain integration to show off some possibilities:

  * Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEK_9wLYEHU
  * Jupyter notebook: https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain/blob/master/docs/modules/utils/examples/zapier.ipynb

We know the API is not perfect but we're excited and eager for feedback to help shape it.

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