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Show HN: I built a better UI for ChatGPT

by trungdq88 on 3/7/23, 11:24 AM with 88 comments

  • by trungdq88 on 3/7/23, 11:28 AM

    I was annoyed by the default OpenAI ChatGPT slow-typing animation and logging me out every day, so I built a new UI client on top of its API.

    It's a static web app, you can host it yourself, data is stored locally on your browser, API requests are made directly to OpenAI API without any middle server.

    It has some more convenient features that make your that experience way better. Like search chat history, prompt library, integrations, etc.

    Would love to hear all the feedback!

  • by lowefk on 3/7/23, 1:38 PM

    Shameless plug: I just don't like closed-source software; here is my attempt at re-implementing ChatGPT's UI as a desktop app with the ChatGPT API, and it is open source: https://github.com/chatgptui/desktop I've implemented most of features of ChatGPT, text-to-speech via Azure, and keyboard shortcuts such as tab/shift+tab.

    Edit: However, as typingmind is earning more than $1000, it should have more features and better maintenance.

  • by ICodeSometimes on 3/7/23, 12:11 PM

    Well done! I wonder if it's worth it to also hide a "select model" option somewhere, since we're putting in our own api keys i'd be interested in trying out other models even though they arent "chat" models.

    Also would be great to see which messages are included in the computation, since chat gpt limits total characters per request to 4K? so inevitably some past messages will be rendered useless.

    Overall well done!

  • by kierangill on 3/7/23, 2:30 PM

    I’m working on the same thing, but open source!

    https://github.com/kierangilliam/chatwithme.chat

    Available at: https://www.chatwithme.chat/

  • by epaga on 3/7/23, 12:15 PM

    This looks very nice, lots of great extra features over the vanilla UI.

    One possible improvement: I had accidentally mistyped my API key and it popped up an HTTP 500 error instead of going "That doesn't seem to be a valid API key, could you make sure you pasted it in correctly" or something...

  • by andygcook on 3/7/23, 2:18 PM

    Tony Dihn built this, who is a fun follow on Twitter if you enjoy indie hacking content: https://twitter.com/tdinh_me

  • by purplend on 3/7/23, 4:34 PM

    Superpower ChatGPT is free, has a ton of features, and it doesn't need your API key.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/11ef8ea/superpower_...

  • by 101008 on 3/7/23, 1:33 PM

    Looks amazing - congrats! I haven't checked the API in detail but how do you keep the context of the conversation (awareness of previous questions and answers)? Do you send back the whole conversation on every request?

  • by Bzzz666 on 3/7/23, 12:49 PM

    Cool project! Thank you! I would request a new feature, a page/document upload (in parts if it is big) to update the right\correct context. For example the current documentation for the framework I use version 27, but chatgpt only knows version 17 of it and I have to upload pieces of documentation every time to get correct updated code snippets.

    That would be great, something like a button\action with a promt that would load and split if needed large amounts of text and promt it in conversation. (maybe add format some parsing, like markdown or plain text)

  • by foolinaround on 3/7/23, 3:29 PM

    ChatGPT has this annoying habit of crashing or having extended downtime.

    If this UI can capture my query in the case of such a crash and keep retrying till I get the answer, and then notify me (browser, email, etc) - that would be great.

  • by throwaway86530 on 3/7/23, 2:10 PM

    Very neat. I am already using it.

    One feature I would love is passing a prompt (or even a conversation) using queryparams. It would help for the integration with other tools.

    Another feature I'd love is to exploit the 'system' agent. From the documentation, there are three possible agents : User, Assistant and System. My understanding is that system can be exploited to drive the expected general behavior of the assistant and seems very useful to that regard.

    Last thing, if it was open-source I could clone it and that would dismiss any fears from having my API key stolen. But that's up to you of course.

  • by Heleana on 3/7/23, 1:06 PM

    Great work on the project and thank you for sharing it! I do have a feature request though - would it be possible to add a page/document upload function that allows for updating the correct context?

  • by punnerud on 3/7/23, 12:07 PM

    Nice, just add from Safari to HomeScreen and you get full screen view

  • by johnjungles on 3/7/23, 12:11 PM

    I just want PWA on ChatGPT

  • by poisoned on 3/8/23, 2:45 PM

    Pretty buggy got `Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).` after a couple of prompts. And I can't access my old conversation anymore and have to restart the whole conversation.

  • by jerpint on 3/7/23, 3:12 PM

    Anyone aware of a mobile app doing something similar? I guess I could use this too vis browser

  • by dmw_ng on 3/7/23, 2:18 PM

    Can anyone recommend a UI clone as close to the regular ChatGPT as possible, but built on the API? The API traffic is sent directly into Azure while the regular UI is sent via CloudFlare. Vastly prefer the former reading my conversations than the latter

  • by thoughtpeddler on 3/7/23, 7:52 PM

    How is this different from Quora's new Poe web app? [1]

    [1] https://twitter.com/adamdangelo/status/1631714221171023873

  • by leobg on 3/7/23, 9:59 PM

    Text to speech output, please. Google WaveNet voices. With a toggle to turn auto-reading of responses off or on.

    Add serpapi on top of that, and you might just become my phone’s most used app.

  • by agust on 3/7/23, 2:07 PM

    It has the one most important feature ChatGPT is missing: add to homescreen/install. Not sure why they haven't added it yet. Thank you for making this!

  • by thunderbong on 3/7/23, 5:02 PM

    To all the HNers here commenting on having used this - are you entering your API keys into this app website directly?

  • by comatose_thor on 3/7/23, 5:04 PM

    Can you please prevent it from zooming on input on iOS devices?