Internet communications have swept everything aside... but amateur radio operators haven't gone away. In fact, amateur radio remains a kind of “parallel world”, but from time to time interesting bridges are built. One of them is the work of William Franzin, who published a proof of concept based on ChatGPT. How does accessing the chatbot through a radio conversation sound...?
The latest news about ChatGPT indicates that OpenAI's chatbot has passed exams in law, business, and medicine. Obviously, that doesn't make it a professional, but it also leaves us with more questions than answers. Now, what happens if we take ChatGPT out of its element and drop it into a completely different territory, say, amateur radio? Does it have anything valuable to offer amateur radio operators? William Franzin decided to find out with a brief proof of concept...
How to Talk to ChatGPT on the Radio
It all starts with receiving a D-STAR voice transmission and converting it to digital audio. That audio goes through a speech recognition system, and the result is used as a “question” for ChatGPT. The chatbot responds as usual, but its text is fed into a text-to-speech engine, and the artificial voice is sent back over the radio.
In the demo, William basically asks ChatGPT how to get an amateur radio license. The chatbot gives a fairly generic answer (which at times becomes hard to hear due to the robotic voice), but it isn't entirely incorrect. ChatGPT assures that with “study and practice”, the approval process will be simple.
This isn't William's first experiment with chatbots and digital assistants: in May 2020, he did something similar with Google Assistant, Alexa, and Watson, combining a DV Dongle device and the DVTool tool under Linux. Instead of activating the assistant by saying “Hey Google” or “Hey Alexa”, William configured it to respond to “Hey D-Star”, with very good results.
William Franzin on YouTube: Click here. Source: Hackaday.
