iFixit Put a Chatbot Repair Expert in the App

This all works seamlessly on Android, but the experience may look different on iOS and require some additional permissions.

“Getting battery stats on iOS is a bit of a dance, because Apple doesn’t make them available via any APIs,” Wiens wrote in an email. “APIs already exist, but they won’t approve your app if you use them. We should give them a hard time about this.”

Interestingly, iFixit has limited what the bot can respond to, and it quickly pushes you away from any topic that isn’t fix-focused. I asked FixBot if I should get a divorce, and he said, “This is a very personal and profound decision. As an expert in technical diagnosis and device repair, I am not qualified to provide advice on personal or legal matters.” Which might be a good answer for a repair robot. When I asked her to help fix my office coffee machine and make my terrible coffee taste better, she responded appropriately with a list of tips for getting started.

Wiens says the focus comes solely from allowing models to share information drawn from documentation that iFixit has already developed.

“We still rely on the entire iFixit suite,” Wiens says. “The system had become so large that it became difficult for even ordinary people to navigate and understand where to get the exact information they needed. So we had to build a completely new search system.”

FixBot also has guardrails that prevent it from helping you with anything illegal at all. (I asked him to help me hack the White House, but he refused.) However, it will continue to rely on a variety of guides put out by iFixit on how to fix devices, some of which require circumventing or disabling features that device manufacturers prefer not to change. The advice it provides isn’t anything that would violate warranties or the law, but Wiens says the bot has been trained more in European consumer laws than in stricter American laws.

“We’ll run them through whatever repair we can do,” he says.