World's Fair 2025
ChatGPT is poorly designed. So I fixed it
Overview
This talk argues that ChatGPT's user interface is poorly designed, leading to a confusing experience despite its rapid growth. The presenter demonstrates issues with its voice and text interaction, highlighting how separate functionalities feel disconnected. The core thesis is that by integrating multimodal capabilities and intelligently routing requests to appropriate models, the user experience can be significantly improved using off-the-shelf tools.
Who should watch
- Product engineers and PMs struggling with complex user interfaces.
- AI engineers looking to improve multimodal AI interactions.
- Builders interested in practical applications of tool calling and agentic workflows.
- Anyone experiencing friction with current AI chat applications.
Key takeaways
- ChatGPT's voice and text features operate as if built by different teams, creating a disjointed user experience, a phenomenon described as shipping the org chart.
- A more effective design would allow simultaneous voice and text interaction, similar to a FaceTime call with an integrated chat.
- Intelligent model routing is crucial; simple requests can be handled directly, while complex ones requiring deeper analysis or code generation can be offloaded to specialized reasoning or coding agents.
- Off-the-shelf tools like real-time audio chat APIs and tool calling can be used to implement these improvements without needing to rebuild the core AI.
- The presenter demonstrates a prototype where voice input can trigger text responses in a chat-like interface, and complex queries are handled by a reasoning model.
- Tool calling can be effectively used for sending text messages with details, such as links or draft emails, by simply providing a description of the tool's function.
- A dedicated reasoning tool can handle deeper dives into topics, providing more detailed responses by sending information back and forth with the model.
- The source code for the proposed solution is available on GitHub.
Notable quotes
*Has no one stopped to ask why is this app so confusing?*
*It really feels like these two apps were built by two different companies.*
*It's honestly amazing how far you can go with very simple prompts these days.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.