William Franzin Puts OpenAI's ChatGPT On-the-Air with a Custom Amateur Radio Interface

With speech-to-text and text-to-speech, Franzin has given OpenAI's ChatGPT a voice — and put it on the airwaves, too.

Radio amateur William "VE4VR" Franzin has put a little artificial intelligence on the airwaves by creating a voice assistant powered by OpenAI's controversial ChatGPT — accessible using a radio capable of Very High Frequency (VHF) transmissions.

"In this case we're using a D-STAR digital voice repeater on VHF," Franzin explains of the project, "which will receive my test transmission, which is digital voice, and then that's sent over the internet to a server in a a data center which has a Northwest Digital Radio ThumbDV AMBE transcoder plugged into it. The voice is transcoded to plain digital voice, it's run through a speech-to-text engine, which is then run through ChatGPT and then all the way back, transcoded, and comes back to the radio."

A radio repeater and bidirectional text-to-speech puts OpenAI's ChatGPT on the airwaves. (📹: William Franzin)

OpenAI launched ChatGPT last November, offering a simple webchat-like interface to its text-based generative adversarial network (GAN) technology. Type in a message, and ChatGPT replies — mimicking understanding but, in reality, simply stringing together the statistically most-likely words you would expect from a response. Its flexibility has captured plenty of imaginations, but the technology has come in for criticism too — ranging from its tendency to make up "facts" as it goes along to its potential uses for academic cheating or malicious compositions.

Those who are on the side of being interested in, rather than concerned about, the technology have already begun to integrate it into other projects, typically using unofficial Python APIs. Late last year Arvind Sanjeev used OpenAI's GPT-3, the GAN behind ChatGPT, to create a typewriter that can talk back — while Franzin's creation puts a vocal twist on the same idea.

The project is similar, in concept if not execution, to Arvind Sanjeev's Ghostwriter. (📹: Arvind Sanjeev)

"We can now ask questions from anywhere," Franzin explains, demonstrating by keying up and asking ChatGPT's radio personality the easiest way to obtain an amateur radio license — and receiving a surprisingly detailed answer in return. "You can talk to the service now from anywhere you can get a radio signal."

Franzin's video demonstration is available on YouTube; the source code had not been released at the time of writing.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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