I made AI talk with my mother — so I don't have to
Dispatches from the future: my little silly piece of speculative fiction
Of all possible tweets, my Saturday morning started with this Reddit screenshot:
Hardly a surprise the post went viral — this little story sparks quite a range of emotions. It directly contradicts (attacks?) a lot of our basic assumptions and beliefs — about education, technology, hustling, social status — and makes us question them, and also wonder: what it’s like to be a teenager today? what’s their future? what’s ours?
Since Saturday, I’ve been thinking about this tweet a lot. I don’t have any of the answers, nor do I have a particularly original perspective — and I’m reluctant to just comment for the sake of commenting with something obvious and surface-level.
What I did, though, is I took this idea of “look, AI is doing very basic human things for me” a little further, to try to see a very near future. Look at it. Try to feel it.
So I wrote a short story. It starts below, right after the asterisks. Hope you enjoy.
Other than that — I hope you’re doing all right in a world that’s on the brink of a nuclear something. I hope your loves ones are close by. It seems kind of silly to seriously think about The Tech and AI and all that when your personal slice of the world is torn apart by a war — but also, it provides a good distraction. (For me. Maybe for somebody else, too.)
In times like these, you seriously need good distractions.
—Eugene
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I made AI talk with my mother — so I don't have to
Okay fellas, so this one is pretty neat, I think. Buckle up for a wild ride.
I don’t really enjoy talking to my mother much. It’s like, we don’t have much in common. But I understand I have to speak with her at least once a week, so that she doesn’t get upset or lonely or whatever. So I did it for many years just to be polite. But it’s really boring and I’d rather be doing something else.
Now, I figured that I can geek up some fancy AI stuffs, and automate the whole thing. Make the computer talk to my mother instead of me!
It’s actually rather simple. Or genius!
What we need:
Speech-to-text to recognize what the mother is saying and turn it into written text
GPT-3 / Answers generator, with a model that’s trained on my writing samples — to generate the responses, in text format
Text-to-speech to read the generated responses out loud in a human voice
Synthetic voice generator, so that the mother hears my voice — that is, a computer-generated voice that sounds kind of like mine
I managed to set it all up and get it working in about two hours. The details of this are rather straightforward, so I won’t focus too much on it.
With that, real-time calls with a mother (or anyone else, really) can be easily automated. Saves me tons of time! Up to 4-5 hours per week.
I installed my setup for a couple of friends, and it’s been wild. They all just love it. Some use it to talk to their girlfriends or wives or mothers — and they seem to get better relationships with them now!
My guys don’t really listen to those conversations so they don’t have any idea what fake-they are saying on these calls, but they get a 1-page summary of the call right after it’s over (auto-generated, of course) — so they can keep track of any important factual information, not the chatting and talking stuff. How cool is that!
Anyway, just sharing my experience. Seems like maybe a good business opportunity here? Automate calls with people you don’t really like talking to, but have to keep the relationship going?
Let me know what you think. Should I keep working on this, turn it into a super convenient app?