Developer Required?

I am on the business side (zero developer experience) and a developer has recommended Prodigy for use in a Machine Learning project.

Question 1: Can Prodigy be purchased, downloaded AND used for annotation without need for a developer if its use is not part of the Machine Learning project?

Question 2: Other than # of licenses for the 2 plans offered, are ALL functionalities identical?

Question 3: If single license plan is purchased, can I upgrade to 5 seats plan and only pay the difference?

Hi @andrewQL,

This might be possible, but there might be rough-spots or obstacles. As I'm sure you understand, product development is all about trade-offs, which requires a pretty clear vision of who the user is and what sort of workflows will be convenient. A product can often be adapted to unexpected usages, but if it's outside the design assumptions, there may be barriers.

Prodigy was really designed as a developer tool for machine learning, so I'm reluctant to recommend it for use by a non-developer in a non-machine learning project. I'm not sure how well it would hold up in comparison to some other alternative, and we may not be able to provide appropriate support.

Yes.

If you do decide to go ahead with the personal license, I'd be happy to offer the upgrade in future if you need it. Just send us an email and we can make the arrangements.

Thank you.
What's the email address?

Hi @honnibal
I have additional questions:

  1. Are there limitations in document length? For instance with 50 - 100+ pages.
  2. Does prodigy work well with structured or semi-structured documents?
    Thanks,

Prodigy itself doesn't have a length limit – although, we typically recommend working with shorter fragments, which makes it easier for the annotator to focus and lets you collect more datapoints overall. It can also have advantages from a machine learning perspective and make it easier to collect data that the model can learn from effectively. You can read more about this here:

This really depends on what you're trying to do and isn't so much about Prodigy itself. Prodigy is an annotation tool that lets you create structured training data for machine learning models and it lets you present pretty much anything you can render with its interfaces. But what your data "means", how you train with it and the models you choose depends on your very specific use case, what you're doing with the data, and so on.

Hi,
I was about to purchase the personal license. As the license is issued to me personally but the work is going to be done by my developer working on a machine-learning tool for my firm. I don't want to violate the terms but how do I provide access to the Prodigy license to the developer for the project? Or is it not possible?
I don't want to get the 5 seats unless I am certain this is the right tool for our project.
Thanks

When you purchase the license, you should be able to enter a separate license holder – so you can order the license under your name and email, and then enter the name of your developer in the "license holder" field. If you entered your name as the license holder by accident, send us an email to contact@explosion.ai with the correct license holder name and we'll update your order accordingly :slightly_smiling_face: