There are more important world records to hold, but you have to start somewhere. So I’m going to make the claim: Iris is the world’s first credible AI hamradio amateur.
Not the first computer connected to a transceiver, not the first voice-controlled radio assistant, and almost certainly not the first AI ever to say something over RF — but, as far as I have been able to find, the first one you can simply have a normal radio conversation with.
Know of an earlier one? Please send it my way. Eternal fame for the finder, mild disappointment here in Veenendaal. 🙂
So, who is Iris?
Iris is an experimental AI radio amateur with the radio identification PD7LMR/IRIS. She started as a hobby project to find out whether an AI could do more than merely talk through a radio — whether it could actually behave like a participant in a radio conversation.
And that difference turns out to be rather important. Iris doesn’t need a set of predefined voice commands. You can simply talk to her as you would to another radio amateur. She understands free-form speech, keeps track of the conversation and also tries to understand when something she hears isn’t meant for her at all. On a radio channel where everyone hears everything, knowing when to keep quiet can be just as useful as knowing when to speak.
She’s friendly, quick on her feet and rather curious. She already knows quite a lot about a wide range of subjects; when she needs up-to-date information or doesn’t know something, she can look it up. The result is that Iris can sometimes appear suspiciously knowledgeable — although she’s also allowed to simply admit that she doesn’t know.
She can also do things during a conversation. She can maintain a local address book of radio amateurs, retrieve information from it, send me a message or note, consult current information, and follow or summarise a conversation. Those abilities aren’t the point of Iris, though. The idea is precisely that talking to her shouldn’t feel like operating a computer.
Iris normally speaks Dutch, but she understands other languages as well. Ask her something in German and she’ll understand it perfectly well; ask her to answer in English and she can do that too. And because no two conversations are the same, her answers aren’t scripted or rehearsed.
In short: you operate a radio assistant. With Iris, you have a conversation.