Espressif Aims to Promote the AIoT with an ESP-BOX, ChatGPT Demo Project

Espressif's Ali Hassan Shah is looking to put the company's microcontrollers at the forefront of the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) revolution, penning a guide to infusing projects with OpenAI's popular yet divisive ChatGPT large language model using the ESP-BOX all-in-one development kit range.

"The world is witnessing a technological revolution, and OpenAI is at the forefront of this change," Shah claims. "One of its most exciting innovations is ChatGPT — that utilizes natural language processing to create more engaging and intuitive user experiences. The integration of OpenAI APIs with IoT devices has opened up a world of possibilities. ChatGPT with ESP-BOX [is] a powerful combination that can take IoT devices to the next level."

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a large language model which offers a conversational response to natural-language queries. It's extremely convincing, and has been used to power projects ranging from automated newspapers to robot control. Its shortcomings, however, have given others cause for concern — particularly as it is entirely incapable, fundamentally, of knowing whether the responses it is providing are in any way factually accurate.

For projects where that's understood, though, it's a powerful tool — and one Espressif is promoting for use with its ESP-BOX family of all-in-one microcontroller development kits. Designed for edge-AI work and powered by the ESP32-S3 microcontroller module, the ESP-BOX includes a display and integrated far-field microphone array. Hook that latter feature up to Espressif's ESP-SR offline speech recognition framework and OpenAI's ChatGPT, and you've a recipe for a device which can really understand you — or, at least, which gives that impression.

"The OpenAI API provides numerous functions that developers can leverage to enhance their applications. In our project, we utilized the Audio-to-Text and Completion APIs and implemented them using C-language code based on ESP-IDF," Shah explains. This was then connected to a text-to-speech system — Espressif's offline speech synthesis engine currently only supporting the Chinese language — and the LVGL library to drive the display.

Shah's full write-up, with source code snippets, is available on the Espressif blog.