Arti-fish-al Intelligence

If you have not had the pleasure of meeting a Big Mouth Billy Bass, it is about time you were introduced. These animatronic largemouth bass props were very popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At first glance, Billy Bass looks like a taxidermied fish mounted on the wall. But when an unsuspecting victim got within the range of the motion sensor (or a trickster pressed a button), Big Mouth Billy Bass flopped into action and belted out a tune like “Take Me to the River” by Al Green. Hilarity was sure to ensue.

Well, the first few times, anyway. After that, Billy Bass got to be pretty annoying for most people. But lots of these animatronic wonders were sold, which means they are still filling up garages and basements to this day. And obsolete hardware that has outlived its original purpose is ideal for hacking away at, as any reader of Hackster News can attest to.

A Reddit user that goes by the name teIand had an old Big Mouth Billy Bass laying around and decided to give it a new lease on life with the help of some modern technology. After gutting the fish, new, more modern hardware was installed to turn Billy Bass into a voice assistant powered by the latest in arti-fish-al intelligence.

After removing the original hardware, the insides were replaced with an Arduino, a Bluetooth module, audio amplifiers, and a handful of other components. The methods were not outlined clearly, but it should be safe to assume that this device was then programmed to connect to various APIs to transcribe a user’s voice into text, forward that text to a large language model like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, then convert the response into natural-sounding spoken language for Billy Bass to utter. As the pièce de résistance, teIand trained the text-to-speech model to mimic the sound of his own voice, so that Billy Bass would sound just like him when giving a response.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the reengineered Big Mouth Billy Bass, teIand asked it why it is qualified for an internship in product management. Billy Bass answered back in his own voice, giving a pretty convincing description of his qualifications, going into his past experience, awards won, and so on. Somebody, please give that fish a job! Billy Bass clearly knows his stuff!

The technical details are light on this project at present, but a number of less-fishy ChatGPT voice assistants have been developed recently (e.g. VoiceGPT, DaVinci), so anyone with a spare Billy Bass around should be able to work through building their own without too much trouble. Happy fishing!