iFixit’s AI-Powered FixBot Puts Expert Advice in Your Pocket

FixBot is a new AI app from iFixit that can figure out what’s wrong with broken devices and guide you through the repair using hands-free instruction, visual analysis, and instant access to the world’s repair knowledge. Available from the App Store and Google Play, the FixBot is optimized for mobile. Free on launch, the company is developing an alternate Enthusiast tier that will cost $4.99 per month or $50 per year and include perks like voice and document upload. FixBot is iFixit’s second attempt at a repair app, following an attempt that ran from 2011 to 2015. Since it went dark, the company’s community kept asking for a more mobile-friendly redux.

In addition to on-the-go AI repair assistance, the FixBot “can help users check on the health of their phone’s battery, find tools and instructions to repair things around their home, and fix their way out of all manner of device problems,” reports Wired, explaining that “it offers mobile access to repair manuals and guides for the more than 125,000 devices iFixit has cataloged in its long running repair library.”

Smart thermostats, e-bikes, robot vacuums, Wi-Fi-equipped air fryers and other gadgets are among the products in the FixBot toolkit, according to an iFixit news post, which points out that today’s consumers “own more stuff than any generation in history, yet we know how to fix less of it. The diversity of what we own has outpaced our ability to learn how.”

Describe your problem by voice or text and Fixbot “does what a good expert does: asks the right questions, narrows down the possibilities, and guides you toward the fix,” helping to diagnose what’s wrong and finding authoritative documentation on the fix,” according to an iFixit blog post.

The company also maintains a website and YouTube channel that offer repair help, where “you’ll find detailed guides to repairing an Apple Mac Studio or a Microsoft Xbox Series X,” PC World says, explaining that the FixBot app is essentially AI trained on iFixit’s library of resources, so questions can be more specifically addressed than a general search or even a search of the iFixit sites.

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