If the internet were a person, she would be blonde and have the voice of Paris Hilton. For the moment. In recent days, three applications of artificial intelligence have proposed, in rapid succession, an appearance, a voice, and a personality, all of which suggest that we are officially entering a new era in our relationships with technology.
The Internet is huge. But if we had to summarize its main form over the last 25 years, we could say that it looks like a collection of websites and mobile websites and applications that we have navigated with a keyboard, a mouse and maybe sometimes a few fingers.
The Internet of the next 25 years will take on a completely different shape. More personal. More human. Literally: We can talk to him and he can react like a human. If you look at the last few days, at least…
A vote for ChatGPT
For a week now, subscribers to the Plus version of ChatGPT have been able to interact vocally with their dialogue partner. On mobile as a bonus. We could already get by with the shortcuts on our phone to replace Siri on iPhone or Google Assistant on Android. We now do it directly in the official application.
With the ChatGPT application in your pocket and all the information it can provide in your ear, a completely different relationship with the Internet emerges. Because at the same time that ChatGPT discovered its voice, OpenAI, the lab that brought it to light, added the ability to collect information anywhere on the web, and not just in a database that will stop updating at the end of 2021.
Another new feature of the ChatGPT application: it can interpret the content of the photos that you want to send to it. Therefore, in addition to talking to him during a walk outside, it is 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 of a familiar place, or something else.
A distinctive feature of ChatGPT is that it is an AI tool that is much more effective than the voice assistants installed by default on Apple and Google phones in understanding the requests made to it and responding appropriately.
There are obviously limits to interaction with ChatGPT: Since the application finds its answers left and right on the Internet, the credibility of its statements depends on the sources used. And major media companies have already announced that they are blocking the web agent that OpenAI uses to collect the information that controls ChatGPT.
In other words, even though ChatGPT has a voice, it doesn’t yet have the science behind it.
28 personalities for meta
In addition to improving its flagship chatroom, OpenAI last week released 28 new versions of an automated chat agent that will take Meta’s messaging applications by storm. The peculiarity of these agents is that each uses the vocal expression of a well-known English-speaking personality: Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, etc.
This novelty is of limited interest to French-speaking Internet users, except that it heralds a trend that will undoubtedly spread to most other languages spoken on the planet sooner rather than later. We can therefore already imagine turning to Ti-Mé for questions about waste management or to Martin St-Louis for advice on how to best express oneself in front of a group of athletes (colorful expressions included).
Across the Anglosphere, many observers were quick to wonder which figures would trust the technology enough to entrust it with the task of representing it in relatively intimate conversations with their fans.
The answer to this question can be found on TV Guide: Given the popularity of reality TV among artists from all walks of life, there will be no shortage of candidates to lend their voices to an AI that may 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 craftsman from Quebec
Anyone who fears a monopoly of American AI can rely on locally sourced AI. 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 certain situations: doing school work, summarizing long texts, suggesting recipes, etc. She still needs a little training: she often answers 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 that could well become the norm in the coming years.