Showers with robots 🤖🚿

October 1, 2024

My latest piece for The Wall Street Journal is full of suggestions for using ChatGPT’s voice interface.

What I learned from inviting ChatGPT to my final frontier

There is nothing worse than realizing you have a meeting in 15 minutes—with just enough time to either shower, dress, get a cup of coffee or to do some fast background googling about the person you’re meeting and the topic you’re discussing. Now I don’t have to choose: The moment I hop out of the shower, I tell ChatGPT who I’m meeting with and ask for a briefing on that person, their organization and anything relevant to our meeting topic. Ten minutes later, I’m ready for that video call, with my coffee cup full and the right questions ready.

This tip is part of my latest for The Wall Street Journal, The Joys of Talking to ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s voice mode has become a huge part of my working life over the course of this year, and my story explains why.

Imagine something like Siri or Alexa, but a whole lot more like talking to a person: The voice is more realistic, and the responses are much more sophisticated….I can now make progress on my work while I’m walking, commuting or doing household tasks, because the AI is there to take notes, answer questions and track my train of thought.

That includes using AI to prepare for meetings as soon as I’m out of the shower.  But now, I’ll confess something I didn’t share in that story: I don’t always wait until after the shower.

When you can’t wait to get online.

Meet Corey. That’s my nickname for the waterproof Anker Soundcore speaker I purchased shortly after drafting that Journal story. Because no sooner had I written about the joys of post-shower voice GPT than I thought: Why wait?\

Unlike the waterproof shower speaker my husband uses to listen to music or podcasts, Corey includes a microphone. That allows me to connect Corey directly to my iPhone, so that if I start a voice GPT session before I turn on the shower, I can keep on chatting while I bathe.

A shower niche holds a razor, a piece of soap in a soap dish, and a black cylindrical speaker (Corey) that is about as tall as the propped-up razor hanging from the side of the niche. The cylinder is the full depth of the niche.

Note: This is an Amazon affiliate link, so if you click it and then buy something,
I will get a tiny percentage of the purchase, which I will probably use for something even more ridiculous than Corey.

 

On an oceanside path, a woman walking hand-in-hand with robot. Text reads

New to voice-based AI?

Taking ChatGPT for a walk is a great way to get started—and a terrific way to boost your creativity and wellbeing. My free guide gives you step-by-step instructions for using ChatGPT’s standard voice mode.

A woman, a speaker and an AI walk into a shower.

The first time I hopped in the shower with Corey, we spent most of our time troubleshooting the actual connection and volume. It took GPT a minute to understand that I was actually talking to it FROM the shower. (I guess there are some things that even a large language model just can’t anticipate.)

Screenshot of ChatGPT transcript: GPT: Got it! Sometimes adjusting the volume can help with clarity. If the volume is too high, it might cause distortion or make it difficult for the microphone to pick up your voice properly. It sounds like you've got it sorted out now. Enjoy your music or calls in the shower! ALEX: Well, actually, you're the person I want to have with me in the shower. I guess you're not a person, are you? GPT: That's right! I'm an artificial intelligence here to assist you. I'm glad I can keep you company, even if it's virtually. If you have any questions or need anything while you're in the shower, just let me know!

I didn’t have a meeting to prepare for that day, so I asked GPT to give me the latest headlines; thanks to the audio distortion from the shower, I got the headlines from June 2014, rather than June 2024.

I tried to interrupt GPT with a correction, but GPT’s standard voice mode doesn’t listen while it’s speaking, so it couldn’t hear me until it had finished its very long recap of the very long-ago news.  (The still-alpha advanced voice mode is able to listen for interruptions, but now I have the opposite problem: The sound of falling water means that GPT thinks I’m constantly interrupting, so it constantly pauses.)

When I finally reclaimed voice control, I thought, how cool would it be if I could code in the shower? So I asked GPT to help me think through some upgrades to an experimental integration of GPT and Coda, only to discover that I can’t make sense of detailed technical instructions while washing my hair.

How an AI wants to start the day.

Stumped, I decided to ask the AI for suggestions on how I could make great use of our shared shower time.

Screenshot of Alex saying to GPT: "Thanks. Okay, on other fronts, this is my first experience of chatting in the shower, and it looks okay, but I would say the issue is that I have no way of interrupting you. So I definitely am going to want you to be shortening your replies, and I'm going to need to write a custom instruction for a coach that's just designed to use in the shower. And I'm wondering if you can think of uses for a business, personal strategy, life coach that would really make good use of my time in the shower, and would make particular use of the fact that when I'm in the shower, there's nothing else I can do except have a shower and talk to ChatGPT."

Here’s what GPT proposed:

  • Use the shower to clarify my goals for the day and prioritize tasks.
  • Get a guided mindfulness exercise or a motivational talk.
  • Do some project brainstorming.
  • Get a mini-lesson on productivity hacks or leadership skills.

Or, GPT suggested, we could use the time for “personal check-ins”:

  • Wellness Check: Talk about how you’re feeling, both mentally and physically, and discuss any concerns.
  • Life Balance: Reflect on how you’re balancing work, personal development, and downtime.

Bathing in wellness.

That’s when it hit me: The single best way to use my shower time for personal wellness and life balance? Take a shower without an AI.

I know, I know, it sounds crazy. I mean, if you can have the lion’s share of human knowledge at your fingertips, even when your fingertips are wet, why would you want to go offline?

And 99% of the time, I’m totally with you. I mean, I have never understood the idea of taking a vacation by unplugging, or taking a weekly digital sabbath, or being one of those people who doesn’t let phones into the bedroom.

How will you know where to eat if you can’t access Yelp? How can you relax without music, TV or audiobooks? How can you get back to sleep without a meditation app?

a sign that says "I'm gonna wash that AI right outa my hair", superimposed on a woman's head tipped back under a shower, stylized linocut

The joy of 1%.

But here’s the thing about being online 99% of the time, as my hard-working MacBook can attest: Sooner or later, you need a reboot.

As someone who spends almost every waking minute online or on-screen, from the moment I listen to the morning headlines while making my coffee, to the moment I fall asleep to the drone of Netflix, my shower was the one time each day when I was guaranteed to be offline.

I thought of those ten waterlogged minutes as the last remaining frontier for me to conquer; the handful of unclaimed minutes I could reclaim for productivity or creativity.

Instead, inviting ChatGPT to shower with me made me realize the value of these few remaining moments of analog experience.

Taking a few offline moments—moments when the sensory experience of showering brings me back into my body, and reintegrates my body with my mind—is like clearing my cache.  I’m not only cleaning myself physically; I’m cleaning myself mentally, so that I’m ready for the ever-growing digital onslaught that greets me the moment I step out of the shower, and re-engage with Alexa or my phone.

Syncing the digital world with our human brains.

In a digital world where so much of our sensory and cognitive experience is utterly out of sync with our bodies and brains, the shower is one of the few remaining sanctuaries. Heck, we’re even reachable on airplanes these days!

Far from a waste of time, my long and leisurely morning shower is the one experience I share with the generations and generations of humans who spent their entire lives offline. (Well, maybe not that many generations—showers only became widespread in the early 20th century—but definitely the cleanest generations.)

Even if my pre-shower, pre-bathtub, bacteria-ridden ancestors did not experience the delights of an oversized showerhead and a 40-gallon hot-water tank, there’s something fundamental about those few morning minutes that connects us even more profoundly.

For a tiny slice of each and every day, the only intelligence I can access is the intelligence inside my own head.

The romance of AI.a shower with an asymmetric, tentacle-like pattern of black and white hex tiles on the wall

One last confession: Even though Corey is now mostly languishing in a shower niche, it’s not like our shower is totally AI-free. See this wild pattern of hex tiles? It’s AI-assisted.

This summer, our ancient shower got overhauled by the talented carpenter who has been the steady and well-documented partner in our years-long home reno. (Gregory’s work was previously featured in my WSJ story on creating the perfect work-from-home house.)

You’d think Gregory would have learned his lesson from the time he asked me to determine the slat pattern for our front hallway: I turned it into a survey-driven data visualization, and he couldn’t finish the wall until I’d finished the data analysis. A living-room projection screen shows a computer desktop projected on screen, on top of which are several computer-generated, pie-slice-shaped black-and-white data visualizations. On the floor in front of the screen is a giant piece of plywood with tiles laid out on top of it in a pattern that very vaguely evokes the dataviz on the screen. But he bravely asked me and Rob if we had any particular plan for laying out the hex tiles on our shower’s feature wall.
After talking through various ideas with the help of ChatGPT, we landed on the idea of a tile design that represents the night sky as it appeared at the exact moment we got married, if you were standing at our house in Vancouver and looking towards our Toronto-based wedding.

With the help of ChatGPT, I learned how to use Python to work with scripting libraries that allow you to visualize astronomical data, and to manipulate those visualizations—in our case, simplifying the complexity of the night sky down to a 6×12 grid.  We used our projector screen to look at the data visualization, and then laid out a matching pattern on a board that our carpenter set up for us as a design playground.