Summary: <br> <a href="https://twitter.com/annabelmaud" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Annabel Fenwick Elliott</a> is a British freelance journalist who previously worked for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> It might have been Tomorrow’s World, that science programme from the BBC from my dim and distant childhood, where they demonstrated an early chatbot, although I think it wasn’t called that. You typed in some text, and up on the suitcase-sized screen came what looked like a meaningful response. But not really. The presenter typed in Necessity is the mother of invention and the machine responded Tell me more about your family.<br> <br> <br> <br> It was just a trick really, a set of pre-programmed vague comments, set to be output based on trigger words entered by the user.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> But if you’ve spent any time on the internet recently, you probably couldn’t avoid breathless reports about how amazing something was that someone did with some AI tool or other, usually ChatGPT. And we can’t have this podcast to be left out, so here goes.<br> <br> <br> <br> I logged in and I thought I’d be a smartass, and see how it could manage with another language, so I typed in tu parles francais? Out came the response Oui, je parle français. Comment puis-je vous aider aujourd’hui? How can I help you today? So far, so impressive, but I was always the sort of kid who had to find out what it would take to break the toy…<br> <br> <br> <br> So then I typed in An bhfuil tú in ann gaeilge a labhairt?<br> <br> <br> <br> Now this is the point where I’m going off the script that I originally had for this. I thought that me reading both sides of a conversation with a computer isn’t the most exciting thing to for you to listen to, so I wondered if I could rope someone who could voice the other side of the dialogue, but I couldn’t get someone who would could do it at short notice.<br> <br> <br> <br> Then I Googled for some text to speech services that you can find online, there’s loads of them out there, but would it be even worth searching for one that could do Irish? Then I found TTSFree. So what you’re going to hear are my questions and the answers that I got from ChatGPT, pasted into that text to speech generator. No other humans involved.<br> <br> <br> <br> An bhfuil tú in ann gaeilge a labhairt?<br> <br> <br> <br> Tá, táim in ann Gaeilge a labhairt. Cad é atá uait a fhios agam inniu?<br> <br> <br> <br> In case your Irish is even worse than mine, there might be one error in there, but ChatGPT said that it could speak in Irish and asked what I wanted to tell it today. So that put me in my place. And, having marched up to the top of the hill, I really had to come up with a question.<br> <br> <br> <br> So I asked what was the best mobile phone on the market these days. Can é an guthán is fearr atá le fáil faoi láthair?<br> <br> <br> <br> Níl aon guthán amháin is fearr ná an ceann eile, mar gheall ar na roghanna éagsúla atá ar fáil agus na riachtanais pearsanta a bhaineann le gutháin. Tá roghanna agat idir iOS agus Android, go leor brandaí éagsúla, agus go leor rialacha éagsúla maidir le conas glacadh leo. Mura bhfuil a fhios agat cad atá oiriúnach duit, ba cheart duit cuardach a dhéanamh ar líne agus breathnú ar na gnéithe éagsúla atá ar fáil le roghanna a dhéanamh.<br> <br> <br> <br> Yeah. That’s ChatGPT giving a pretty coherent explanation that there are different features on different phones that suit different people. No errors, although the text to speech didn’t quite manage to pronounce iOS, but … wow.<br> <br> <br> <br> I suppose I shouldn’t have asked it for a value judgement, so I went for something more fact-based. I asked whether Irish and Scottish Gaelic the same language. An é gaeilge na hÉireann agus gaeilge an Alba an teanga chea...
