Generative AI-powered chatbots: a new interface that has the potential to solve information overload
What if you could always access the knowledge of your favorite teachers? Giving everybody access to the most knowledgeable mentors? OK, that’s not what I’m gonna promise — but I built a chatbot based on my favorite meditation teacher — and it provides a new interface rather than listening to his podcasts. I’ll talk a bit about the need for a chatbot and how generative AI technology creates a new platform shift, given a small glimpse how that would look like with ChatJoseph.
A need for a new interface
Joseph Goldstein has been a very influential teacher to me. If I had to pinpoint someone who would come closest to being ‘enlightened,’ I would say it is Joseph Goldstein. For those who don’t know Joseph, he is one of the first people to bring mindfulness, or to be specific, Theravada Buddhism, to the West. Although I have never met him in person, I’ve received so many words of wisdom through his meditation, podcasts, and even live Q&A sessions over Zoom.
However, as with most famous people, it is difficult to ask him a personal question; that’s why I got extremely excited when he started offering various live Zoom sessions to ask personal questions. For a few weeks, every Wednesday morning, I woke up at 6 am and eagerly awaited him to answer my previously submitted question. Unfortunately, there must be many others, as my questions were not answered during the sessions. A little disappointed, I resorted back to the podcasts.
Podcasts are a great source of information, but which of the 26 hours of podcasts has the answers to the specific questions I have? About once a month, I do a one or two-day self-retreat, where I do nothing but sit on my pillow. Many questions pop up those days. Unlike a few 10-day meditation retreats that I’ve attended, I cannot ask any questions to my teacher. So there, once again, I resorted back to podcasts. The big question: which podcast should I choose?
Meet ChatJoseph
Inspired by ChatGPT, I had an idea: what if I create a chatbot based on Joseph Goldstein? Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to ask Joseph Goldstein a question at any time, a clarification on one of his previous lectures, and perhaps a podcast recommendation that is useful for your current practice? So I spent three weekends creating a simple prototype.
How it works?
- You can ask chatJoseph a question about any meditation or Buddhist-related topics
- ChatJoseph will then look through 26 hours of transcribed lectures of Joseph Goldstein, get the relevant pieces, and return an answer using GPT-3.5
- You can then reply, request the sources, get a podcast recommendation based on the previous question, or ask a new question
Try it out yourself at https://chatjoseph.vercel.app/
I’ve also created an in-depth article about the technical specifications, creating a tutorial of how to build your own chatbot using GPT-3.5:
Generative AI: a new paradigm of information curation
Real-time access to ask your favorite teachers a question. Twenty-five years ago, it might have been impossible for me to learn from Joseph Goldstein. I had to be extremely lucky that he would visit Europe, or I had to save enough to visit him in the United States. With that perspective, it is already incredible to have access to hours and hours of his teachings in the form of lectures, guided meditations on Youtube, and even live Q&A sessions on Zoom. But, it would be even more incredible to get help on my practical issues in real-time. For me and all of his students. Is ChatJoseph the perfect solution? No. But it is incredible how well it already functions, and one can only imagine how close we’ll be in the near future.
I’m incredibly excited about the generative AI space. The pre-internet age was all about accessing the right information: cramming books at the library, getting in touch with a mentor you’ve met through a friend of a friend of a friend. The internet is a bomb of information: you now can hear tips from the world’s top athletes and performers, can follow lectures of Ivy League schools for free, and listen to podcasts from almost every CEO. The big challenge of the current internet age is not getting the right information but curating the right information. Many people fear that generative AI will contribute to the problem of having even more information out there, but it might be the solution for curation. Rather than having to look through entire corpora of texts or listen to hours of podcasts to get the information you want, you can now get the exact bits and pieces written for you in the format you desire. Of course, there is still tremendous value in listening to, at first, seemingly non-relevant content. You often don’t know what you still need to know, and innovation comes from serendipitous encounters. However, albeit as a complementary interface, generative AI might be the next wave that enables you to be more selective about which content you consume.
By leveraging generative AI technology such as GPT-3, ChatJoseph is able to answer users’ questions about meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhism by searching through a corpus of transcribed lectures and returning the most relevant pieces of information. While there are still limitations to the current version, this type of chatbot has the potential to become a new interface for any library of content. The possibilities of generative AI are just beginning to be explored, and the future is exciting.
