This Question-Answering Typewriter Is Like Having Siri within the ’70s

Although they’re removed from good of their fashionable incarnation, Maker Cameron Coward’s newest video shows us what smart assistants might have been like within the ‘70s, decades before voice recognition and even personal computers, when an electric typewriter would have been the only way to interact with them. We’re abruptly much more appreciative of Siri now.

The typewriter used here’s a Texas Instruments Silent 700 Terminal, which served two functions. It may very well be used as an everyday typewriter, albeit one which was quite a bit quieter than its predecessors by way of using a dot-matrix print head that used a heating component and thermal paper to put in writing as an alternative of ink-soaked ribbons. Its different use, because the “Terminal” in its identify implies, was as a approach to remotely connect with and use computer systems by way of a built-in modem and acoustic coupler. This got here at a time when the concept of everybody having their very own pc was laughable, so in a bizarre approach, it was nearly like an early model of ‘the cloud’ all of us closely depend on now.

The typewriter’s skill to each ship and obtain messages and instructions by way of telephony is what Coward used to show the Silent 700 right into a retro sensible assistant. This construct is definitely an update of an older attempt to make this typewriter sensible, which used a script working on a Raspberry Pi Zero W to ship inquiries to the Wolfram Alpha “answer engine.” But that method suffered from a handful of problems, together with lengthy boot instances, an unavoidable login to a Linux terminal, and requiring very particular formatting for the questions.

This time round, as Cameron has thoroughly documented on Instructables, a less expensive and extra streamlined ESP32 was used, which communicates with Wolfram Alpha over wifi, however interfaces with the Silent 700 typewriter by way of its serial port (consider it because the USB port’s great-great-grandparent) as an alternative of the acoustic coupler (which might ship beeps and boops over a telephone line). The new and improved model of this sensible typewriter boots up in seconds and might reply questions with out the necessity for particular instructions or phrasing, identical to right now’s fashionable sensible assistants.