Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

I hooked up an analog phone to Whisper, ChatGPT, and TTS. I used of one of those old timey candlestick phones you'd see in a 1920 gangster movie. Initially this was a prop for a murder mystery party I was hosting (ChatGPT would give clues if you said certain words), but now I use it for a silly distraction here and there. Ask ChatGPT a question by picking up a phone like it's last century! I think it is fun.

I am using Asterisk on Debian that calls my python script. The analog phone adapter auto dials when the receiver goes off hook, because rotary dialing sucks that much and the answering extension is chatgpt role playing different characters based on prompting.

I think it is neat. I need to work on better voice synthesis and improve latency a bit still, but it is a nice toy.

That sounds like a lot of fun, and really interesting to boot! I hadn't heard of Asterisk until today.

Have you written anything on the development of this project, or is this something you'd consider? I would love to build something similar, and the idea of combining old analogue technology with modern tools and integrations- especially PBX- is quite intriguing.

I haven't written anything up, but I might do that.

Asterisk is extremely powerful and reliable with good documentation. Because so many companies use it, I knew if something wasn't working that it was definitely on my configuration. Once you have Asterisk running on the LAN, you can you use any VOIP softphone app to connect and make "calls" to your scripts for testing.

I bought an analog telephone adapter (ATA) to connect the phone to the LAN as well. At that point, the ATA is the bridge between the PBX and the physical phone and it can now make and receive calls (to destinations reachable by the PBX).

If you want to make your scripts and devices accessible to the "real phone system" (PSTN) you can hook your ATA to a phone carrier (some ATA support this with a secondary port) or have asterisk connect to an external provider. I have not done this step.

There is definitely a bit of steps involved, so it would make a good write-up. A lot of potential to do some fun things with it.

How long is the delay between question and answer?

It is currently highly variable. Oftentimes it can be a few hundred milliseconds and the conversation feels natural but other times the whisper api will take like 10 seconds to create a response.

I did create some static filler phrases stored locally (ummm, let me think, good question) to break the silence.