# ChatIoT (2022–2023)

> The 2022–2023 ChatIoT subproject of Omnia: building Web of Things infrastructure, running Zurich's first WoT meetup, and — once ChatGPT launched — giving it access to IoT devices to create ChatIoT, a kind of MCP for IoT, tested in the SICK smart factory.

- Canonical URL: [https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/story](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/story)
- Site index: [https://massimo.context-use.com/llms.txt](https://massimo.context-use.com/llms.txt)
- Last edited: 2026-07-24T21:33:41.814Z

By 2022, before I started my master's thesis *[link to come]*, we were getting more and more serious about building the infrastructure that would let applications seamlessly access the IoT devices they needed via [the Web of Things](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2021-2022_web-of-things/story).

### The first Zurich meetup

By then, we were starting to get involved in the Web of Things community, and organized the first meetup in Zurich. We were impressed to see that, though the community was quite niche, people came all the way from Munich to attend our presentation:

![The first Zurich Web of Things meetup: the schedule slide (team intro, Project Omnia, Project OpenATS, Q&A and networking) as the evening begins.](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/meetup-1){layout=half}
![Presenting to the crowd at the Web of Things community event.](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/meetup-2){layout=half}

### ChatIoT is born

Then, one day in November 2022, ChatGPT hit the world, and we started playing around with giving ChatGPT access to IoT devices. That's how ChatIoT was born. In a way, we had invented [MCP](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro) — but limited to IoT devices.

![Presenting ChatIoT — the title slide: "ChatIoT — Talk to your company's devices."](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/chatiot-presentation-1){layout=half}
![Demoing ChatIoT to the room: a dashboard you can query in natural language, ending on "Interested in using Chat IoT for your business?"](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/chatiot-presentation-2){layout=half}

The fact that we could now chat to machines and devices was mind-blowing. With my [Learning from Interactions](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/projects/2021-2022_learning-from-interactions/story) project, devices could observe and learn your preferences; now you could have a full conversation with them. This is what technology that disappears truly meant. We realized that there would be no barriers between man and machine anymore, and we started looking for places that could benefit from this new superpower.

### The SICK smart factory

The [SICK](https://www.sick.com/ag/en/) smart factory seemed like a great place to test this out:

![The SICK smart factory's test production line — a robotic cell — with ChatIoT connected, so you can ask the machines questions from the laptop in the foreground.](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/sick-factory){size=large align=center}

During a few-day hackathon at their headquarters, we turned their (test) production line into [Web of Things](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2021-2022_web-of-things/story)-enabled devices and connected ChatGPT to Omnia, so that any production-line problem was now one message away.

![A Raspberry Pi–based node we wired up at the SICK hackathon to make a production-line device Web-of-Things-enabled.](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/sick-hackathon){size=medium align=center}
![Presenting Omnia at SICK: a slide reading "Omnia — Figure out the problems of your production line, simply by asking questions to the machines," with the team and the solution.](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2022-2023_chat-iot/sick-presentation){size=large align=center}