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Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you already know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform every aspect of our lives. The reasons are fairly obvious. AI can process and analyze massive amounts of data in seconds that humans could spend months and years collecting. AI is being used to develop new drugs and treatments, diagnose diseases, and provide personalized care to patients. It’s being used to develop self-driving cars and trucks, optimize traffic flows, and improve public transportation. It can be used in manufacturing to automate tasks, improve quality control, and reduce costs. And AI can be used in the financial world to detect fraud, assess risk, and make investment decisions. Because of AI’s encyclopedic prowess, it can also write a mean term paper with human-like prose. That’s the good news. The bad news is that not everything AI regurgitates is accurate so be extremely careful relying upon AI exclusively to make decisions. See if you can spot the problem in this ChatGPT response:
ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI, a company backed by Microsoft®. Within two months after launch, ChatGPT had over 100 million subscribers. It is trained on a massive dataset of text and code and is able to generate human-like text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. The knowledge cutoff date for the gpt-3.5-turbo version of ChatGPT is September 2021. For users of Incredible PBX, today we’re pleased to bring that ChatGPT model to a telephone near you.
To get started, you’ll need three components. First, you’ll need an Incredible PBX 2027 platform with Debian 11 or Ubuntu 22.04 running on Windows, a Mac, or Linux. Turnkey versions are available for dozens of virtual machine and cloud-based platforms. If you’re using Incredible PBX 2027 on the Rocky 8 platform, you will also need to install the gTTS text-to-speech engine from here. Second, you’ll need to obtain a free OpenAI_KEY here using your Google, Apple, or Microsoft email account. And, third, you’ll need to obtain a free Speech-to-Text API_KEY and API_URL from IBM. Once you have the three pieces in hand, you’re ready to proceed with the installation for your Incredible PBX platform. After installation, you can make ChatGPT queries using any telephone connected to your PBX. Simply dial 2428 (C-H-A-T) and speak your query.
Installing the ChatGPT Telephone Interface
Not every ChatGPT response is suitable for use with a telephone. You wouldn’t want ChatGPT reading you a term paper or spouting out some Asterisk® dialplan code. Nor can most telephones display photos. So our deployment for Incredible PBX today provides two ChatGPT solutions: (1) a command-line interface that is accessible from a terminal or via SSH: chatgpt -p "your query". (2) The telephone interface is accessible by dialing 2428. For the telephone interface, be careful what you ask. You don’t want a 10,000-word response. For example, a good query might be "What are the five best Atlantic coast beaches in the United States." A not-so-good query would be "What are the best restaurants in the world."
To get started after installing Incredible PBX using one of the numerous tutorials available here, log into your server as root and issue the following commands:
cd / wget https://filedn.com/lBgbGypMOdDm8PWOoOiBR7j/ChatGPT/incredible-chat.tar.gz tar zxvf incredible-chat.tar.gz cd /root
Once the components have been downloaded and installed, navigate to the /root folder.
Enter your ChatGPT and IBM STT credentials in the following files:
- Edit chat and insert your OPENAI_KEY in line 6
- Edit chatgpt and insert your OPENAI_KEY in line 15
- Edit chatgpt.sh and insert your OPENAI_KEY in line 12
- Also insert your IBM STT API_KEY in line 16 of chatgpt.sh
- Also insert your IBM STT API_URL in line 17 of chatgpt.sh
Complete the install by issuing the following commands:
cd /root sed -i '/\[from-internal-custom\]/r chat.code' /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf chmod +x chat* sed -i 's|:wav|.wav|' /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf mv chat /usr/local/sbin mv chatgpt /usr/local/bin mv chatgpt.sh /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"
NOTE: The chatgpt command-line tool does not work on the Rocky 8 platform because of a bug in their fold implementation. However, both our chat command-line tool and the 2428 telephony interface work fine once the gTTS text-to-speech engine is installed for Rocky 8.
Making a Test Call with ChatGPT
Now that all the pieces are in place, let’s make a test call. From a phone connected to your Incredible PBX server, dial 2428. At the prompt, enter the following query: What Are the Five Best Gulf Coast Beach Resorts in the United States? Within a minute or so, ChatGPT will provide the answer using the gTTS text-to-speech engine included in Incredible PBX. Enjoy!
A Cautionary Note About ChatGPT
We’ll close today with this cautionary note about ChatGPT… from ChatGPT:
Originally published: Friday, October 20, 2023
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Great topic/article highlighting AI is not exclusively in the domain of research, term papers, and code snippets for new programmers. Imagine a future where an authenticated call is placed to one’s pharmacist helpline and AI is able to provide risk-rated interactions with the OTC cold medication you wondering if you can take along with your current prescriptions.
Hey Ward
I have been following you since somewhere around 2008. Thanks for your consistency over all of these years.
I am actively using both ChatGPT Plus as well as CoPilot Pro (the Microsoft version) and find them invaluable. I have had great luck in creating custom GPTs which essentially forces ChatGPT to respond within the confines of a pre-defined persona.
It seems this should ultimately allow the creation of an AI phone-answering assistant that could answer questions, send messages, and route calls. I am wondering if this might be an option in the current state of Asterisk-ChatGPT integration. Thanks!