iFixit Put a Chatbot Repair Expert in an App

All of this works seamlessly on Android, but the experience might look different on iOS and require some additional permissions.

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

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

Wiens says that focus comes from only letting the models share information derived from documentation iFixit has already cultivated.

“We’re still relying on the entire corpus of iFixit,” Wiens says. “The system has gotten so large that it’s hard for normal folks to even navigate and understand where to get the exact information they need. So we had to build an entirely new search system.”

FixBot also has guardrails that prevent it from assisting you with anything wholly illegal. (I asked it to help me hack into the White House, but it refused.) That said, it will still pull from a variety of guides iFixit has put out about how to repair devices, some of which require circumventing or disabling features device manufacturers would rather you not change. The advice it gives isn’t anything that will violate warranties or the law, but Wiens says the bot has been trained more on European consumer laws than the stricter American laws.

“We’ll run them through any repair that we can,” he says.