D. Beamon Gives Your Arduino ChatGPT Powers, By Tying It Into the Arduino IoT Cloud

Maker D. Beamon has put together a guide for connecting OpenAI's popular thought divisive ChatGPT large language model chat-bot to an Arduino development board — using the Arduino IoT Cloud as an intermediary.

"The project involves using an Arduino IoT Cloud compatible device, such as an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect or any ESP32/ESP8266 device, as a middleware between the IoT Cloud and OpenAI's GPT-3.5 language model," Beamon explains. "The device receives prompts (questions) from the IoT Cloud, sends them to the OpenAI API, receives and parses the replies, and sends them back to the IoT Cloud."

While receiving no shortage of criticism for its innate inability to understand the truth or lack thereof behind the usually convincingly-worded responses it generates, OpenAI's ChatGPT has proven a popular tool for a range of tasks from summarization to simulated discourse. The company's launch of a public application programming interface (API) only promoted its use further, and it's this API which Beamon's project uses — requiring the user to have an account with OpenAI, a valid API key, and enough credits to query ChatGPT.

"On the IoT Cloud we will have a dashboard that we will use to write the questions (prompts) and receive ChatGPT's replies," Beamon explains. "You can use your mobile phone and the IoT Remote app compatible with both Android and iOS. Write a question on the [Chat Window] box and wait for the answer. It will take a couple of seconds and will give you a parsed answer. That’s it. [Or] write a question on the Question box, push the 'Send Question' button and wait for the answer. It will take a couple of seconds and will give you a parsed answer."

Beamon has a few ideas for building atop the basic project, too, including using the microphone built onto the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect board to recognize speech as a valid way to input prompts for ChatGPT and daily task automation using natural-language queries processed by the large language model.

The source code for the project, and instructions for setting the Arduino IoT Cloud dashboard up, are available on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3; the project is also published on the Arduino Project Hub.