Beijing Daily Client | Intern reporter He Rui
Recently, ChatGPT has been born, attracting people's attention in the field of artificial intelligence. A team of assistant professor Yuan Ren and three masters and doctoral students from the School of Information Engineering of Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School has developed an AI office aid tool called ChatExcel, which can realize interactive control of Excel through text chat. The beta version of ChatExcel was released on February 28 this year, and the peak daily active users of the beta page reached 110,000 in just half a month, and the cumulative number of unique IP visits exceeded 2 million.
Peng Ren worked with classmates to debug the program in the work of the Institute of Advanced Research
ChatExcel is an AI aid tool that enables Excel interactive control through text chat, which the team calls a "workplace artifact." Yuan said: "Users do not need to remember various operation formulas, directly say commands to it in text form, and this software can complete various tasks in Excel." Our goal is to make this professional software easier to use. ”
No need to remember functions, no need to manually set formulas, as long as you enter the requirements in the text box under the table, ChatExcel can complete the self-operation, and you can export Excel tables with one click. Not only that, ChatExcel can also meet the needs of continuous interaction and iterative update of users, "new requirements proposed by users + tables generated in the previous round" can meet the needs of users to detect results, return redo at any step and make adjustments and modifications at any time, and it can also realize cross-table collaborative processing. The product is completely open, the tester does not need to register any information, open the web page can be used, unlimited times, greatly reducing the threshold and technical difficulty of Excel.
Last November, ChatGPT received a lot of attention after its release. The front-end models of ChatGPT and ChatExcel are both natural language models, but they only have this in common. In Yuan's view, ChatGPT is a general model trained through massive data, which can solve certain problems in different fields. But ChatExcel is a small model, and the problem to be solved is the vertical domain problem in a specific scenario. ChatGPT is like an all-around "liberal arts student" that relies on powerful data analysis capabilities to tell users what the conclusion looks like. ChatExcel wants to create a vertical field of "science students", the first problem to solve is operation. Although ChatGPT can solve the corresponding code, the related operations have to be done by the user, and a large number of users want to operate Excel, but they will feel that Excel operation is very cumbersome because they can't remember those formulas.
Liu Zhenhui of the R&D team said: "The team is more focused on improving the capabilities of the model in specific scenarios. Many people have not learned programming, considering Excel different users, the product can help people without professional table processing knowledge, we position it as 'a small but beautiful tool in the vertical field', its value is to free everyone from complex and cumbersome form processing work, improve user efficiency and data analysis ability. ”
ChatExcel has intelligent language understanding, cloud storage, artificial intelligence assistance and other functions, and some functional modules are not currently open. "In the future, what we look forward to is to lower the operating threshold of more professional software, so that these interesting gadgets can make the work more convenient and concise; As for the long-term goal, the team may expand its membership and hope to create a 'Chat ecosystem' and interactive AIGC. Yuan said.