Dropped it? Smashed it? iFixit’s new AI-powered app can help you repair it | usagoldmines.com

iFixit, which has become known for its teardown videos and repair solutions, is launching a mobile app with a twist: AI assistance to complete repair jobs you normally wouldn’t be able to do.

While the iFixit app for both Android and iOS will be free, the new FixBot may not be. The company’s plan is to make it free for now, then split it off into a free tier with access limits and then a paid Enthusiast tier with voice and document upload, according to the company. That tier will cost $4.99 per month or $50 per year, the company said.

If you’ve heard of iFixit, it’s probably in the context of the detailed teardowns of popular devices like Apple iPhones and other consumer gadgets. What iFixit learns in those teardowns, however, contributes to both thousands of repair guides on the site for you to review and download. The iFixit site also maintains a database of parts and tools, all of which will be in the app as well. But the iFixit app also includes two neat additions: the FixBot application as well as a battery health intelligence application.

The whole point of iFixit, however, is do-it-yourself repairs. The iFixit site has existed as sort of a text-based alternative (aside from the teardown videos) to how-to videos on YouTube. The site shines when the number of devices is small and/or popular. You’ll find detailed guides to repairing an Apple Mac Studio or a Microsoft Xbox Series X; however, the laptop repair section simply gets bogged down by the incredible variety of offerings from, say, HP. The same goes for the site’s section on car repair.

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Fixbot: the chatbot mechanic

What the Fixbot app promises to do is essentially replace ChatGPT. LLMs, or “generative AI,” are trained on a vast corpus of knowledge, so Copilot or ChatGPT can try to answer questions about the causes of the French Revolution, the lifecycle of a starfish, or how best to code an application. The FixBot app is essentially AI trained on the iFixit site itself, so that any questions you might have will hopefully be a more efficient manner of searching the site itself.

According to iFixit, the Fixbot application will help you identify what you’re fixing and what needs to be fixed, based upon information you provide and questions it might ask. Obviously, FixBot will try and point you to an existing guide if one exists.

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“We spent over a year building a custom retrieval system that searches our entire library in seconds,” Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, said in a blog post. “And an evaluation harness that tests FixBot against thousands of real repair questions, so we catch the bad answers before you do. We created a database with millions of pages of documentation; the data sheets and service manuals and specification tables that the rest of us only look at when we’re desperate. FixBot will find the right PDF manuals, look deep inside, and surface the answer on page 576. It’ll even cross-reference part numbers against your specific model.”

The app allows you to describe your problem via text or even voice — the latter’s the most useful when your hands are full or you’re leaning over a malfunctioning appliance. You can also upload a photo of the interior of your malfunctioning gadget, and let FixBot help diagnose what you’re looking at.

The other interesting thing that the iFixit app can do is to give you an estimate of your phone’s battery capacity, in real time. Like any battery, your phone’s battery degrades, so that the total capacity at “100 percent” becomes less and less over time. shrinks In a laptop, that’s relatively simple: you can use the Windows’ battery report tool. In a phone, it’s a bit more complicated.

The iFixit’s app tracks the first time that your phone was first used, and the current capacity versus the total rated capacity. Divide one by the other, and you can get a measure of your phone’s battery health — and an indication on when you might consider replacing it.

iFixit

The challenge is accuracy. iFixit says that Apple doesn’t make its data available via an API that the company can access; Samsung’s software is reserved for its own service and repair centers. Still, the company promises that you’ll at least get a basic explanation of your phone’s health.

iFixit might not have the answer you’re looking for, because of all the varied appliances, cars, and gadgets available. But it’s a free app that benefits you immediately with the phone battery monitor. I’ll be downloading it onto my phone.