The Future Is Almost Now

Things have not exactly gone well for pint-sized voice assistants powered by cutting-edge large language models. Without a doubt, there is a lot of interest in a device of this sort, but to date commercial implementations have not worked well enough to meet consumer expectations. Perhaps the best example of a major flop in this area is Humane’s AI Pin, which was hyped to no end and purchased by many people despite its high price tag. Unfortunately, the device did not perform well, was quickly discontinued, and took the whole company down with it.

But it may not be the idea that is flawed, but rather that the underlying technology is not quite up to the task yet. Those technologies are advancing by the day, however, so if we had a more flexible device with a dynamic user interface that could interact with a variety of AI models, it could improve over time. That is the idea behind a tiny handheld AI chatbot recently developed by PiSugar. It is made of hobbyist-friendly hardware components that are infinitely customizable and only cost about $120 all in.

The brains of the operation is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. These miniscule single-board computers pack a lot of punch for their size, and they are energy-efficient enough for mobile applications. The computer is paired with the soon-to-be-released PiSugar Whisplay HAT, which includes an LCD display, an onboard speaker, and a microphone. The speaker and microphone are essential for a voice chatbot, and the display adds some charm and the potential for multimodal interactions. Power is supplied via a PiSugar 3 1200mAh rechargeable battery. An optional 3D-printed case gives the device a more finished look.

While the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is powerful for its size, it is not up to snuff for any serious AI applications (although that may change over time as models are getting smaller and more efficient). So rather than running an ultra-small model that is of little practical use directly on-device, the chatbot uses the wireless capabilities of the Pi Zero 2 W to interact with cloud-based AI algorithms via their APIs. Since the device is running Linux at its core, it is not limited in which tools it can interact with, now and in the future.

Today’s technology may not be able to give you the voice-based chatbot experience that you really want quite yet, but with the PiSugar chatbot you don’t need to wait. You can experiment with the best systems available today, and when the perfect solution comes along, you will already have the device you need to make the best use of it. If you want to be one of the first to get a Whisplay HAT, you can sign up to be notified when it is released.