If the Internet were a person, she would be blonde and have the voice of Paris Hilton. For the moment. In quick succession in recent days, three artificial intelligence applications have proposed an appearance, a voice and a personality which all suggest that we are officially entering a new era in our relations with technologies.
The Internet is vast. But if we had to summarize its main form, over the last 25 years, we could say that it looks like a bunch of web and mobile sites and applications through which we navigated using a keyboard, a mouse and maybe sometimes a few fingers.
The Internet of the next 25 years will take a completely different shape. More personal. More human. Literally: we can talk to him and he can respond like a human. If the last few days are anything to go by, at least…
A voice for ChatGPT
For a week, subscribers to the Plus version of ChatGPT have been able to interact vocally with their dialoguer. On mobile, as a bonus. We could already get by with the shortcuts on our phone to replace Siri on iPhone or the Google Assistant on Android. We now do it directly in its official application.
With the ChatGPT application in his pants pocket and all the information it can deliver in his ear, a completely different relationship is established with the Internet. Because at the same time that ChatGPT discovered its voice, OpenAI, the laboratory that brought it to light, added the ability to collect information anywhere on the Web, rather than only in a database that has stopped being updated at the end of 2021.
Another new feature of the ChatGPT application: it can interpret the content of the photos that you want to submit to it. In addition to talking to him during a walk outside, it is therefore possible to take a photo with his phone and send it to him with a quick click. You can ask him to identify the essence of a tree crossed on your path, details about a known location, or something else.
A particularity of ChatGPT is that it is an AI tool significantly more effective than the voice assistants installed by default on Apple and Google mobiles to understand the requests made to it and respond appropriately. .
There is obviously a limit to interacting with ChatGPT: as the application finds its answers left and right on the Internet, the credibility of what it says will depend on the sources used. And already, large media groups have announced that they are blocking the web agent that OpenAI uses to collect the information that drives ChatGPT.
In other words, even if it has a voice, ChatGPT does not yet have the infused science.
28 personalities for Meta
In addition to improving its flagship chatroom, OpenAI released 28 new versions of an automated chat agent last week that will take Meta’s messaging applications by storm. The particularity of these agents is that each uses the vocal expression of a known English-speaking personality: Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, etc.
This novelty is of limited interest for French-speaking Internet users, with the exception that it presages a trend which will undoubtedly be transposed sooner rather than later into most other languages spoken on the planet. We can therefore already imagine turning to Ti-Mé for questions relating to waste management, or to Martin St-Louis for advice on the best way to express yourself in front of a group of athletes (colorful expressions included).
In the Anglosphere, many observers quickly wondered which personalities would trust technology enough to entrust it with the mandate of representing them in relatively intimate conversations with their fans.
The answer to this question can be found in the television schedule: given the popularity of reality TV with artists from all walks of life, there will be no shortage of candidates to lend their voice to an AI which will perhaps at times be more eloquent than ‘them.
That’s because we don’t yet know of an AI capable of drinking champagne in a hot tub…
Lia 27: the Quebec handyman
Those who fear a monopoly of American AI can fall back on AI of local origin. For example, Lia 27 officially saw the light of day in Montreal at the end of September.
Lia acts as a mobile personal assistant for specific situations: doing school work, summarizing long texts, suggesting recipes, etc. She still needs a little training: she often responds in English, for no apparent reason.
But the AI whose avatar is a young blonde woman with blue eyes is right about one thing: it embodies a new way of using technology which could well become the norm in the coming years.