ChatGPT is being used for the brains to build a smart Siri, by a developer. This is useful for those who are frustrated with the current state of Siri and want a better experience.
A Smart Siri
Are you frustrated with Siri's inability to understand your queries? There's a way to get Apple's voice assistant to work with GPT-3(Opens in a new window) (OpenAI's deep learning language model used for AI chatbot ChatGPT) to become a lot more conversational and smarter.
Developer Mate Marschalko used Siri's voice, Apple's Shortcuts app, GPT-3's smarts, and a little bit of hacking to create a surprisingly smart home assistant that can respond to fairly demanding queries.
There is a video where we can see someone issuing increasingly complex commands to its assistant. In one example, the person says, "Yesterday took me a while to fall asleep. Do you have any suggestions to help me sleep better?" To this, the assistant responds by suggesting a warm bath, reading a book, and avoiding caffeine. In another example, Marschalko says, "Notice that I'm recording this video in the dark, in the office. Can you do something about that," and the assistant promptly turns on the light.
The ChatGPT assistant added in is excellent at knowing what to do...
Compared to Siri, Alexa, and Google's Assistant, this home-brewed assistant appears to better understand complex queries, but it also responds in a way that's a lot more like talking to an actual person.
Marschalko says that building this smart home assistant was a fairly simple task. "I was able to achieve all this by simply asking GPT-3 in my prompt to pretend to be my home assistant, listed the items in my home, a few other details about time and location, and then asked it to respond in a structured, categorized data format (JSON) which I could then use to trigger the control messages in HomeKit in a series of if and else programming statements in a single Siri Shortcut," he wrote.
It Will Cost You
It does require some very basic programming knowledge, but almost anyone can do it under an hour (according to someone familiar with how to do it).
While this demo seemingly puts Apple's Siri to shame, it's not quite that simple. You have to pay for API requests to GPT-3 and that costs about $0.014 per request. Unlike Siri, this smart home assistant isn't free to use. And any future incarnations of ChatGPT won't be either.
And Siri, like other widely used AI assistants, is designed never to be rude, obscene, or do something that might be considered harmful; a language model like GPT-3 has some safeguards in place, but it can definitely respond in unexpected ways. Finally, without testing the bot ourselves, it's hard to say how often it gets things wrong.
What do you think of this alternative to Siri? Will it be affordable enough to build?
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