This project originally started from simple curiosity. My wife’s company purchased a Temi Robot a few months before hiring her. Although Temi is a cool piece of technology, it lacks the ability to be useful without a fair bit of programming and tinkering, which her company didn’t have at the time. So, it ended up collecting dust until my wife started working there. She was tasked with trying to see if they could make any use of it. In the end, she brought it home for me to look at and see what I thought of it.
After spending some time with Temi, I discovered that you could do quite a bit with it if you knew how. This included making it play audio clips on command. So, without hesitation, the first thing I did was make it into a funny little robot that wandered around to randomly selected predefined locations and played sound bites from a famous robot called Claptrap. Although very cool and fun, her company didn’t have much use for a semi-autonomous robot wandering their office, harassing employees, and making a ruckus.
However, what they did have a use for was a Kiosk Robot that you could ask questions about their company. So, I proceeded to create a second mobile app that was hooked up with a ChatGPT API capable of reading documents given to it and providing dynamic and intelligent responses based on Blink Marketing, as well as performing everything else ChatGPT is known for.
The app itself has a settings screen where you can access the API and Assistant ID and modify them as needed. The settings are locked behind a password screen so that if it’s left alone, someone can’t just come up and steal the API information. It also has a few other features like the ability to reset the conversation if Temi goes off-topic or if it has any issues accessing required files. This project was one of my most recent projects and was honestly a lot of fun to work on and figure out how to work with a Temi Robot. The neat thing about Temi is it’s really a glorified Android Tablet on wheels. So, the new stuff I had to learn was mostly related to the Temi library.