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Show HN: A more "conversational" AI assistant (github.com)
1 points by wircho 865 days ago
What is special about this assistant is that it can leverage interfaces (web search, Python, etc) directly within its messages. For example, as it realizes that it needs to calculate 1 + 1, it might type "[PYTHON] print(1 + 1) [/PYTHON]", and the output "[OUTPUT] 2 [/OUTPUT]" gets inserted right after, before the assistant continues streaming its answer.

The seamless insertion of code and output within the conversation - as opposed to the more standard approach (ChatGPT Plus, AutoGPT) where the assistant has to classify your prompt, select appropriate actions from a menu, and then use them to prompt other external agents - turns out to produce a really useful assistant that is both surprisingly autonomous and aware of its own limitations.

Use it as you wish (and at your own risk of course). Here are a few examples of things I have successfully used Saola for in the past few days:

- I asked it why some app kept telling me to "close Chrome" after I had already closed it. Saola quickly realized that the app was seeing processes from another session.

- I asked it to help me set up a new Python package I was building. It moved files around, (after confirming that I agreed), it asked me some necessary questions and read Python files to derive dependencies for the pyproject file.

- I asked it to find and successively open a bunch of spreadsheets for me from different places, so I could do some edits and print each of them to a PDF. At every step, it would check that I saved the PDF to the right place.

- It helped me brainstorm a solution for a math problem, verified particular cases as asked, and provided ideas from the patterns it observed.