Ben Hart, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, runs ToastWiz, an A.I. wedding speech-writing business that provides best men, maids of honor and couples’ parents with scripted remarks. He started the service in December, after a bout of nerves gripped him a few years ago at his own mother’s wedding, when he had headed to the microphone to propose a toast, and blanked.
After that deer-in-the-headlights moment, Mr. Hart heard what might have been a worse speech at another wedding: “It was a father of the bride speech, where the father was bragging about how much he paid for the wedding. It was awkward and uncomfortable.”
For $30, and in less than 15 minutes, ToastWiz generates three original speeches with the help of GPT-3, another A.I. chatbot. Chris Noessel, an author and public speaker who helps audiences understand A.I., and whose day job is actually designing A.I. for IBM, said that even though bots such as ChatGPT are free, the $30 price tag will be worth it for some.
“Just because you have access to this tool doesn’t mean you’re going to know how to use it well,” he said. Those who are terrified of wrestling with words for a speech and are not tech-savvy, he said, may find a service like ToastWiz — which is tailored to write specifically for weddings, unlike ChatGPT — more helpful.
Mr. Noessel, who lives in Richmond, Calif., is among the few ever to be married by an A.I. officiant. On April 2, 2018, he and his husband, Benjamin Remington, a user experience designer, exchanged vows read aloud by a chatbot.
