GPT Home Runs Circles Around Traditional Home Assistant Devices
GPT Home is a smart home assistant device that harnesses the power of ChatGPT to very confidently answer any question with eloquence.
The rapid advancement of LLMs (large language models) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has made older AI technology seem quaint in comparison. If you’re like most people, you probably felt that Siri and Alexa were frequently confused by even simple requests. ChatGPT, on the other hand, seems to be able to answer just about any question you can throw at it. So why not replace your outdated home assistant with Judah Paul’s GPT Home?
This is, essentially, ChatGPT in dedicated device, similar to a Google Nest Hub or Amazon Echo. Instead of Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, or Alexa, it uses OpenAI’s famous ChatGPT to respond to user inquiries.
That is more powerful in many ways, but also comes with a lot of limitations. ChatGPT is much better at crafting natural responses than those other AI assistants, but it won’t have up-to-date real time information. It also won’t connect to most other services or control other devices. Oh, and it may hallucinate—something for which ChatGPT is now infamous. So you shouldn’t assume that the answers you receive are factual.
With those caveats out of the way, we can talk about how this works. It contains a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, which runs the local scripts and software. That connects to ChatGPT through OpenAI’s API—but, importantly, ChatGPT itself does not run locally. The Raspberry Pi listens to the user through a USB microphone and plays responses through a mini speaker. It can display some status information on a small OLED screen. If desired, the user can set up GPT Home to run on a battery.
Behind the scenes, Paul setup several different software tools to work together. For example, a speech recognition library lets it listen for a wake word and a prompt. Conversely, the eSpeak library turns ChatGPT’s response into spoken audio. Others, like Spotify, help it interact with other services — though this is very limited.
While the many disadvantages of ChatGPT will limit the widespread appeal of GPT Home, there is something to be said for a device that will very confidently answer any question with eloquence. The answers may not always be true, but you’ll probably never hear “sorry, I couldn’t understand your question” from GPT Home.