Without thousands of hours of sci-fi media to get lost in, it is no surprise that makers like to take a little piece of their adventure home with them. Today, we've got an example from Knight Rider Historians' YouTube channel. These guys love all things Knight Rider, and they recently showed off an excellent KITT replica that uses a Raspberry Pi and ChatGPT to work as an interactive prop.
A quick look through the channel's history will show that the duo behind the channel, AJ and Joe, have amassed a huge collection of props from the original Knight Rider series. The Knight Rider fandom has been going strong for years. In fact, we covered another Raspberry Pi-powered KITT replica in the past, but that one didn't have any integration with AI.
This KITT prop is designed to resemble the voice box from the car. It listens for audio input and processes it using speech-to-text so that the data can be parsed to ChatGPT. From there, ChatGPT generates a response in the way KITT would speak. This text is then transposed into audio played while the LEDs flash to mimic how they would flash on the original show.
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Knight Rider Historians use a Raspberry Pi 4 to control the operation in this case. It's connected to a USB mic and USB speaker for audio input and output. According to the video, the KITT board was submitted by a viewer and features a matrix of LEDs that flicker during the text-to-speech process.
You don't need anything special as far as an operating system goes. The AI tools work with Raspberry Pi OS, which is arguably the easiest OS to get started with on the Pi. The ChatGPT portion of the project is handled using OpenAI, an open-source tool that lets you send and receive requests to ChatGPT.
If you want to see this Raspberry Pi project in action, check out the video shared on YouTube by Knight Rider Historians, and be sure to follow them for more cool Knight Rider stuff.
