RISC OS BBC BASIC User Guide AI Assistant released

To everyone interested,

I am delighted to announce that the 2nd of four RISC OS AI Assistants, designed for beginners and those wanting to enjoy playing with AI and BBC BASIC, is now available to everyone! 😊

Important Notes Before You Start Using the AI

YES, PLEASE READ THEM ;)

- The tools presented here are a type of Generative AI (GenAI), meaning they specialise in generating human-readable responses within the broader AI umbrella.
- These tools DO make mistakes, so DO NOT TRUST THE AI BLINDLY <—— Got it?
- GenAI tools lack reasoning or intelligence; they are purely statistical correlation generators. Consider this project a kind of “advanced” search engine only.
- With the current generation of neural networks, there are – and will be – limitations.
- Privacy: I do not collect any data on your usage, so if you encounter an issue, please report it directly, as I won’t be aware otherwise. If you don’t report it, then it’s not a problem ;)
- ALPHA QUALITY: The tool is in its alpha stage, so I’m actively working on improving response quality. If you find a problem (e.g., incorrect information), please report it via the link below:

- This specific AI assistant is designed to help with BBC BASIC on RISC OS, which means it can:
– Help people understanding an existsing BBC BASIC program. Copy and paste it on the AI chat and ask the Ai to explain what it does.
– Help people with BBC BASIC question in multiple languages.
– Help people to start writing some code and have fun with BBC BASIC.
– It does have a selection of fully working examples on various aspects of BBC BASIC programming (included WIMP and ToolBox programs), but it needs more labelled and categorized examples to be able to answer more complex requests, so whoever wish to help writing more examples please feel free (remember you must heavly comment your code so the AI can categorise it and use chuncks of the code correctly in new programs).
– Show examples of how to call specific SWIs in BBC BASIC
– Write some playful programs for people to have fun

What’s This Project All About?

The tool announced today is an “instance” of a larger project, the overall initiative is a complex system designed to discover, process, and store information about RISC OS. The engine running on my servers collects data about RISC OS and uses it to generate a graph database (based on graph theory, if you’re familiar). The end result is a knowledge base that powers various AI tools.

In this case, the engine generates and publishes a subset of information in the form of embeddings and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) for OpenAI, enabling the service you’ll use to ask questions about BBC BASIC for RISC OS (it should cover all releases from Arthur, but hey it’s GenAI, so don’t expect miracles).

How to Access the Tool

To use the tool (still in alpha), you’ll need:

1) An account on OpenAI ChatGPT
2) This link: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-Jiy1wCIxC-risc-os-bbc-basic-user-guide

Once in, just ask questions and see how it goes.

Important: Everytime you have a chat with the AI, check at the very bottom of the chat if you have a notification that says “a new version is available”. If so, click on that link to start a new chat if you wish to use the new and improved version. Each new version foundamentally should provide better results for your questions.

OpenAI allows to have free accounts too.

Browsers and Compatibility
If you’d like to use it on RISC OS, I’m afraid right now there seems to be no browsers on RISC OS that supports OpenAI UI. The LLAMA 3.3 version is experimental and runs on Linux only, but via Olama you can access it vie Nettle. The DeepSeek version also has to be executed locally and again via Ollama you can access it via Nettle (send me an email if you wish the local version, but be ready to have a beefy system to run them on, 64 cores and 2 NVidia GPUs required right now).

The service has been tested also on Linux, Windows, macOS and BSD. On Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and a few others.

The service does NOT work in NetSurf.

Please note: Given that chats can become quite heavy, I strongly recommend to use Linux, BSD, macOS or Windows to access the service.

What’s Next?

- We all know RISC OS documentation can be, well, a bit… imprecise, and the AI is in a similar state at the moment (I am fixing the documentation as I have time).

Have fun and let me know if you have issues! Cheers :)

BEFORE OFF-LOADING YOUR PROBLEM SOLVING TO AI TOOLS, please read this research paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

While I am happy to provide services and tutorials to keep RISC OS as a fun hobby alive, I do not endorse nor recommend to use AI tools for Cognitive offloading and/or off-load your problem solving to GenAI tools. Please use them responsibly.

How to ask question to the AI

Here is an example prompt:

Write a program to display a Mandelbrot set in 24-bit colour. 
A single-tasking approach is fine. Ensure the best code quality 
and follow the BBC BASIC rules on RISC OS.

Try it out. For more details, here I wrote a full mini guide for everyone:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/19572?page=1#posts-152964

Cheers

can you use this from the GPT app on M4 Mac?

Hi Rob,

I don’t have “the GPT” app on the Mac, I had a quick check on the App Store and there seems to be 2 different “Chat GPT” based apps, both developed by 3rd parties (so be careful using them, these 3rd party developers may have access to your personal data).

Unfortunately on both of these two apps there is no description of how to use Custom GPTs. The RISC OS BBC BASIC User Guide AI assistant is a Custom GPT on OpenAI platform, so maybe try to search for this term in their instructions?

Sorry for not being more helpful!

P.S.

If you instead meant the Apple AI ChatGPT new thingy, I have it turned off, sorry, so no idea if it can access Custom GPTs.

Yes it is the new Apple chatGPT installer thanks for your help.

No problem at all, hope it works!

A reminder to some user who have asked if it’s possible to use British English for the responses, YES you can configure ChatGPT to use British English instead of American, check your accoutn settings and expressly say “Use British English in the response” in the ChatGPT traits field.

Any language can be used, here is an example of (finally) being able to interact with both the RISC OS User Guide and the BBC BASIC user guide in Italian:

Not only it generates the response in the desired language, but also the program comments.

Cheers!