Hands-free help in the kitchen, the garage and the studio.
Ask with your hands full.

Why a face helps from across the room

Voice assistants have one annoying habit: from a few steps away, you cannot tell whether they heard you. You ask, you wait, you ask again louder. A face solves that. Facelet’s characters look at you while you talk, glance away while ChatGPT thinks, and speak the answer, so one look at the corner of the screen tells you where things are, even with the sound of a pan in your ears.

Behind the face is ChatGPT’s voice conversation, which is good at exactly the questions that come up mid-task: substitutions, timings, conversions, what a step in the instructions actually means. And Float keeps the character in a small tile over your recipe, manual or pattern, so the thing you are following never disappears behind a chat window.

Where it earns its place

• The kitchen. Scaling a recipe, replacing a missing ingredient, how to tell when it is done, what “fold in” means.
• The garage and the bike stand. Talking through a repair with greasy hands: what to check first, which way a part goes.
• Knitting, sewing and crafts. Decoding pattern abbreviations without putting the needles down.
• Music practice. Asking for the notes in a chord or a quick explanation of a rhythm, instrument still in hand.
• The garden bench and the paint table. Repotting, mixing colours, cleaning up afterwards.

Cooking with it, start to finish

1. Open the recipe and float the character over it. Open the page in Safari, press ⌘⇧F, and put the tile in a corner that does not cover the ingredients.
2. Switch the microphone to Always listening. You speak and it answers, with no key to press.
3. Put the Mac somewhere safe. Out of splash range, away from the sink and the steam, where its microphones can still hear you.
4. Tell it what you are making. The dish and how many people it is for. It keeps that in mind for the rest of the conversation.
5. Ask as you go. Interrupt it the way you would interrupt a person if the answer is running long.

Things to say

• “I’m making this banana bread for eight instead of four. What do I double, and what don’t I?”
• “I’m out of buttermilk. What can I use instead?”
• “How do I know when the onions are properly caramelised?”
• “What’s a hundred and eighty degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit?”
• “My bike chain keeps slipping on the smallest cog. What should I check first?”
• “What does k2tog mean in this knitting pattern?”

How to set it up

• Always listening. The whole point is not touching the Mac. Switch the microphone mode before you start.
• Mind the distance and the noise. A MacBook’s microphones hear you across a counter in a quiet kitchen. Over an extractor fan, a mixer or power tools, move closer or use a headset.
• Float over what you are following. The recipe, the manual or the pattern stays in view; the character sits in the corner.

What it won’t do

• It cannot set timers or alarms. Use your oven, your phone or a kitchen timer for that.
• It cannot see your pan or your bike. Facelet never uses your camera, so describe what you see.
• It does not read the recipe on screen by default. Say the step out loud, or turn on the experimental computer use, which can read the front window of Safari and other supported apps after you approve each request.
• It is not a qualified tradesperson. For gas, mains electricity, or anything structural, call a professional.
• In Always listening mode it hears everything the microphone hears, including the radio and other people.