Chatbots from Google, Microsoft, and more promise to revolutionize how we access information – and not just through browsers like Chrome or search tools like Bing. On Wednesday, tech enthusiast website Tom’s Hardware unveiled a chatbot all its own.
The site explains its new AI-powered feature this way:
To avoid this, the Tom’s Hardware bot was trained exclusively on Tom’s content and replies with an “I don’t know” to certain questions it can’t (or shouldn’t) answer.
Under the bot hood
The bot was built using OpenAI’s text-davinci-003 model, otherwise known as GPT-3, and trained on a custom dataset of articles rather than the entirety of Tom’s content library. The data is stored in a vector database from Weaviate and the bot is coded primarily with Python, using LangChain, a framework that makes it easy to customize AI output, the site said.
And it’s a work in progress! The editors say they hope to add new capabilities including access to structured data: benchmarks, product specs, and up-to-date pricing. Right now the model gets some of this data from article texts, but it’s not as organized in that format.
Tom’s Hardware is owned by Future PLC, the media giant that owns TechRadar. Yep, you guessed it: We hope to have a similar chatbot in the near future based on this same innovative technology. Chatbots are all the rage, after all – and they’re definitely on our radar.