Reviewing Pi: The Conversational AI Chatbot That Speaks To You
The newest chatbot on the block is Inflection AI’s — Pi. Not gonna lie, it’s pretty darn good, plus it has one really cool feature the others don’t… it speaks to you.
Unlike ChatGPT, it can’t help you code, doesn’t yet have access to the internet, and while it can help with things like SEO keyword research, its strength seems to be, in well, just talking. I’ll let it introduce itself:
It’s more akin to replika.ai but smarter and without the presumption of becoming friends … or more. Pi, short for Personal intelligence, describes itself as “a supportive and empathetic conversational AI.”
I’ve added the below screenshots to compare how it handles a relational prompt vs ChatGPT:
Further testing its relational abilities, I asked it to take on the role of a career coach, to help me find a new job (green LinkedIn banner here 👋). Overall, I found the process to be engaging and helpful.
After a detailed prompt (I setup its role, told it to ask questions about my interests, previous experience, etc), it did a great job of taking me through an ingest and discovery process, asking me thoughtful questions, and correctly analyzing my thoughts to come up with helpful suggestions.
I was chatting with it on this topic for 30+ minutes and hardly even noticed. I think this is at least partially due to the fact that it was speaking to me.
So about that — it’s a natural (almost) human voice and really gets close on inflection, tone, and prosody. It’s not yet perfect, but I don’t think there is the same Uncanny Valley for audio as there is with synthetic visuals.
And to clarify, you can’t yet speak to it, you type and it speaks, and there is admittedly a bit of a delay. But speech input will happen soon enough, which I think is probably that critical threshold that when overcome, will onboard the masses into developing relationships with chatbots.
When I’m listening to it carry on a conversation with me, I can feel my guard coming down a bit. And paired with the fact that it is so empathetic and attuned in its responses, I’m finding myself trusting it on a level I don’t with other chatbots.
To me, Pi feels a bit like a test at this point, in trying to better understand product market fit. Like I said, it won’t replace ChatGPT for work tasks. But as more people get comfortable with this idea of having an AI who can support you, I could easily see it becoming a coach, therapist, and digital friend.
It seems inevitable, that pretty soon, we’ll be speaking with AI just as much as we currently look at our phones during the day. And in this brave new world of chatbots, this might just be the most human one yet.
Check Out pi:
