Comment by justinlloyd
2 years ago
As a child growing up in the UK I was allowed to call up, each evening, the bedtime stories phone line run by British Telecom. I used to call that bedtime story phone line from an an old 1970's era rotary Snoopy telephone from British Telecom which I still own.
I ever so carefully updated the phone with a new RJ-30 jack (the original was bare wires), so that in a custom built base that the phone sits on is an Nvidia Jetson running an LLM and trained on Charlie Brown's voice and a voice recognition model.
Dialing 1 will answer questions about Snoopy and Peanuts history and Charles Schultz in Charlie Brown's voice. You can just talk to it. Dial 2 and a very nice lady with a British accent will read you a bedtime story, interactively, like a choose your own adventure of sorts, from a large database of stories. Dial 3 and Lucy will pick up, announce that the therapist is in, and talk with you about what's troubling you, again, voice recognition and an LLM. Dial 4 and you get Woodstock. Any other number gets you an "adult" from the Peanuts cartoon that is impossible to understand, again, voice recognition to understand what you're asking, but the response is unintelligible.
That's amazing!
I'm separately very interested in LLMs, but still very much in a "keep them the hell away from my kids" mindset.
Unfortunately I'm not terribly knowledgeable about the various AI revolutions that've been going on recently but this is the kind of project I'd love to try out doing! Would you ever consider doing a write-up? Or do you have any guides you'd recommend for getting started with this kind of thing?
OT, but for some reason the phrase "the various AI revolutions that've been going on recently" is incredibly amusing to me. To be clear, this is a compliment, not a criticism! There's something about referring to something implied to be incredible with such nonchalance that makes it sound like it sound like it comes from a sci-fi short story or something.
What a lovely project! Would you be willing to share your work? As with the project that kicked this off it would be great to see it even if it's just a jumble of scripts that would not work for anybody else.
Oh man, even a blogpost about the technical means of building this would be so delightful to read! Please share if you're able?