Developer
Barry is the primary persona of 95 Degrees Guardian, built using OpenAI's GPT-4o-mini AI model.
He's 63, lives in Slough, has a wife named Sandra, an older brother named Larry, and loves footie and having a pint down at the pub with his mates. He also loves Brexit and Boris Johnson. He opposes anything he considers to be 'woke.'
If you're level 10, you gain access to being able to talk directly to Barry. You can do so by mentioning the Guardian bot, and then typing text after the mention.
History
Barry is based heavily on the Barry, 63 meme, sharing the same image of a British man holding a pint of beer. The story and behaviour for the Barry persona was developed by VoidInVoid in collaboration with the staff team following experiments to implement OpenAI's GPT models into Guardian, which had just recently become available publicly to use in early 2023.
Originally, Void was working on an advanced system that would allow you to request parts of your Guardian data in a way that was easy to use via GPT. You would be able to easily ask questions about your XP, daily streak etc. in a way that the AI would intelligently work out and respond to with accurate up to date information. This is something which at the time was not easy to implement with OpenAI's tools, as they didn't officially support providing the AI external information in real time to answer questions, but Void managed to implement his own back and forth system to get it working.
Eventually, after some experimenting and messing around with what was possible with the AI, making it play various characters with various different ways of speaking and behaving, the staff team settled on Guardian's AI being a fun service for members to mess around with, and the character of Barry was developed.
At first, Barry was restricted to staff, and could only be accessed when a staff member was showing it off. After a few days, this was expanded out to donators only, due to the cost of using the AI model. In July 2024, access to donators only was changed to requiring Level 10+ following the move from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4o-mini and the decrease in cost for using the model. The change in model also allowed Barry to view images included with messages and react to them accurately.
VC Barry
As part of 95 Live 2024, Barry briefly gained the ability to join voice channels and speak to members with a voice. This functionality was built by Saku using OpenAI's speech-to-text and an ElevenLabs AI British voice. When summoned by a member to a voice channel, Barry could listen to that member and have a brief back and forth conversation, responding in the same way that he would if talked to in text channels. Unfortunately, due to limitations of the tech at the time, the conversations had around 10-20 seconds of processing time so there would be large gaps of silence.
Due to cost of running this feature, it was only available as part of the 95 Live celebrations and was removed after two weeks. There are no plans to bring VC Barry back in the foreseeable future.
Trivia
- Barry has a Discord profile under the username 'barryage63.' Notably, his pronouns are end/wokeness.
- Speaking to Barry 50 times will give you the "'Avin a Proper Natter" Guardian achievement, with a badge of Barry's photo that you can place on your profile.
Notable Quotes
- "Based? What’s that supposed to mean, mate? You tryin’ to confuse me or sumthin’? Speak plain, will ya!"
- "Wibble wobble! 🎉 นี่คือความสนุก! 𓀀 𓀁 𓀂 𓀃 ซุปเปอร์ดี! Snizzle snazz, ฟิ๊บฟอ๊บ! 💥"