Spelling It All Out

Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini have taken the world by storm over the past few years. Many people now use them daily as a replacement for traditional search engines, to aid their creativity, or even just to have someone to talk to. The use cases are so varied at present that no one is really sure which ones are going to emerge as the killer apps for this nascent technology.

A pair of researchers at the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany recently conducted a study ostensibly aimed at investigating how individuals interact with artificial intelligence (AI). They had to pass their work off as being academic to please the university, of course, so they went into the history of human-machine interactions, how people view AI, and what interactions with AI look like. Blah, blah, blah, and so on and so forth.

Investigating human-AI interactions?

But it seems that what this team really wanted to do was hack away at their weekend hobby project at work. They hacked an old electric typewriter to hook it up to ChatGPT so that you can interact with the chatbot via a teletype printer, you know, because science. This is a project that would be just as much at home on the pages of Hackster as it is the academic journal it was published in.

The project was built around an Erika S 3004 electronic typewriter, an East German office workhorse first released in the 1980s. This machine was powered by a Z80 CPU clone and was equipped with 8 KB of RAM and 32 KB of EEPROM. Most importantly for the present work, it also featured a serial port. That port turned out to be the perfect entry point for connecting it to the 21st century.

Connecting a typewriter to the 21st century

To bring this aging machine into the AI age, the researchers made use of an ESP32 microcontroller. With built-in Wi-Fi, a dual-core 240 MHz processor, and half a megabyte of RAM, it has got what it takes to handle the task of brokering conversations between man and machine.

With only six wires, the ESP32 was tied into the Erika’s extension port, handling both serial communication and power delivery. The typewriter spoke in an odd East German character set, so a custom substitution routine was needed to translate between Unicode text from ChatGPT and the Erika’s limited glyph library. When the user typed a prompt, it was printed to paper as usual, but the characters were also piped through the ESP32, wrapped into a JSON request, and sent off via HTTPS to whichever large language model was selected.

Whether you see it as an academic experiment, a maker project, or a cultural commentary, there is no denying the charm of watching ChatGPT replies clatter onto paper, one keystroke at a time, on a 40-year-old typewriter.