The online repair service iFixit has a new app out today. When you open it, you will see something you’ve likely grown to expect in a new release: a chatbot.
The app, now available for both iOS and Android, 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. 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.
The new chatbot, called FixBot, just makes finding what you need all that much easier. Need to replace the screen on your iPhone? Change the tire on your 1986 Volvo station wagon? FixBot can help if you just type or speak your request by describing the problem you’re having. You can even use your phone’s camera to get started. Snap a pic of that Volvo’s flat tire, your non-working iPod, or your broken espresso machine, and FixBot’s computer vision engine will probably be able to recognize what model it is and walk you through the process of fixing it.
FixBot is a fusion of a dozen different AI models from just about every player in the generative AI space. The bot is intended to focus solely on repair, pulling from iFixit’s ever growing pool of repair guides and giving you links to find where to get the spare parts or special tools needed to do the fixing. (Most of those links go back to the iFixit shop, naturally.)
“It’s going to be a game changer for all of us who have a lot of problems with repair,” says Kylie Wiens, CEO of iFixit and occasional WIRED contributor.
The process of building out FixBot has taken iFixit a couple years. The goal wasn’t necessarily to make a chatbot in an app, Wiens says. But he says an average of 10 million people come to iFixit to help fix their stuff every month, all with a variety of different fixes needed for hundreds of thousands of devices. An AI helper seemed a good way to answer questions and help people find an exact solution.
(This is not the first iFixit app. The company had a rather basic mobile app for iOS and Android, but after iFixit published a teardown of the Apple TV in 2015, Apple removed the first iFixIt app from its App store. It remained in the Google Play Store. Both versions are now updated.)
The app is also a good way to check and see what’s going on with the device you’re using it on. I installed the app on my Pixel 9 Pro and the very first thing I saw when the app opened is that my phone’s battery health is at 98 percent—a “Good” health rating, according to the app. To back up that assertion, you can tap into the window and find a bounty of information about your battery. You get links to a guide for replacing the phone’s battery, a link to source the battery itself, data about how the battery cycles through its power capacity, and how many months or years your battery likely has left. At the end, there are tips for how to make your battery last longer.
All of this works seamlessly on Android, but the experience might look different on iOS and require some additional permissions.
“To get battery stats on iOS is a bit of a dance, because Apple doesn’t make it available via any APIs,” Wiens wrote in an email. “There actually are APIs, but they won’t approve your app if you use them. We should give them a hard time about this.”
Amusingly, iFixit has limited what the bot can respond to, and it quickly pushes you away from any topic that’s not focused on repair. I asked FixBot if I should get a divorce and it said, “This is a very profound and personal decision. As an expert in technical diagnostics and device repair, I am not qualified to give advice on personal or legal matters.” Which is probably a good answer for a repair bot. When I asked it to help fix the office coffee machine and make the terrible coffee taste better, it responded appropriately with a list of tips to get started.
Wiens says that focus comes from only letting the models share information derived from documentation iFixit has already cultivated.
“We’re still relying on the entire corpus of iFixit,” Wiens says. “The system has gotten so large that it’s hard for normal folks to even navigate and understand where to get the exact information they need. So we had to build an entirely new search system.”
FixBot also has guardrails that prevent it from assisting you with anything wholly illegal. (I asked it to help me hack into the White House, but it refused.) That said, it will still pull from a variety of guides iFixit has put out about how to repair devices, some of which require circumventing or disabling features device manufacturers would rather you not change. The advice it gives isn’t anything that will violate warranties or the law, but Wiens says the bot has been trained more on European consumer laws than the stricter American laws.
“We’ll run them through any repair that we can,” he says.
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