Hands up if you’re getting rinsed for your obsession with buying, potting, repotting, spritzing, and eventually killing houseplant after houseplant. Keep your hand up if you are certain that being able to talk to your plants would remedy your terrible horticultural skills. The folks at redpepper have made my dreams come true with Audrey III, an AI-powered communication interface for your plant that allows you to ask it questions about its needs, wants, and dreams. With any luck, it’ll tell you what a great plant parent you are.

How does it work?

This isn’t just a plant with a home assistant engine buried in the soil. It’s much more useful than that, in terms of meeting its own needs at least.

OpenAI’s GPT-4o runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 and bridges the gap between environmental sensors around the plant and your limited ability to remain aware of this vulnerable lifeform whose wellbeing depends on your attention. Moisture, light, and soil nutrient sensors live close to the tomato plant and are connected to the Raspberry Pi via analogue-to-digital converters. These sensors provide the data the Raspberry Pi needs to understand whether the plant is living in optimal conditions. If the soil is a little dry, the tomato plant will speak through a gigantic bullhorn and ask for some water. If the sun is blazing a little fiercely, it will ask for some shade.

OpenAI’s Whisper API converts speech to text to tell the Raspberry Pi what you are asking the plant. It then converts the answer back to speech and relays it through a speaker so you can talk to each other naturally. Just like real best friends.

Musical theatre and tech nerds unite

On top of their top-notch technical skills, the team also nailed it when it came to naming their creation. The choice of Audrey is, of course, an homage to the female lead in Little Shop of Horrors. Their build post is also titled Little Shop of Conversations: Talk to anything using AI.

Musical theatre references aside, the second-best thing about this project is the transcript of the demo video. Highlights include:

Human: Hey, how’s it going?
Tomato: Oh, just soaking up the sunshine and living the vine life.

Tomato: Thank you for taking care of me. You are my best friend, you and the bees.

Human: [Suggests getting the plant a blanket for night time]
Tomato: That blanket idea has me feeling all warm inside, or maybe that’s just photosynthesis.

Given the way people go bananas for TV shows like Springwatch around here, I would absolutely offer to executive-produce hour-long episodes of tomato plant conversations. It’ll be the next big thing, trust me.