IFixit’s New AI Assistant Can Help You Fix Almost Anything.
Generative AI has reached the point where you can ask bots like ChatGPT or Gemini questions about almost anything and get perfectly reasonable answers—and now, renowned gadget repair site iFixit has joined the trend by creating its own AI assistant ready to solve any hardware problem you may have.
While you can already turn to versatile chatbots for advice on fixing your phone screen or diagnosing a car engine problem, there’s always the question of the accuracy of AI responses. With FixBot , iFixit aims to minimize errors by leveraging its extensive library of verified repair guides written by experts and users.
This is certainly reassuring: I don’t want to waste time and money replacing a broken phone screen with a new one of the wrong size or shape. And using a conversational AI bot to solve gadget problems will often feel more natural and intuitive than searching on Google. As iFixit puts it, the bot “does what a good expert does,” guiding you to the right solutions.
How FixBot improves accuracy
The iFixit website has been around since 2003—practically ancient, considering the rapid advancement of modern technology. The iFixit team has always prided itself on its detailed, thorough, and verified repair guides, and now all this information is available through the FixBot tool.
iFixit says the bot is trained on more than 125,000 repair guides written by people who have gone through every step of the process, as well as Q&A forums attached to the site, and a “massive trove” of PDF manuals iFixit has accumulated over the years.
This gives me much more confidence that FixBot will provide the right answers than ChatGPT or Gemini. iFixit didn’t disclose the AI models powering the bot—only that they were “hand-selected”—and included a custom-built search engine for selecting data sources from the site’s repair archive.
“Every answer starts with a search for manuals, parts, and repair methods that worked,” the iFixit team says, and this conversational approach, familiar from other AI bots, is present here too: if you need clarification on something, you can ask a clarifying question. Likewise, if the AI bot requires additional information or specifics, it will ask you.
The system is designed to be fast—responses should arrive in seconds—and the iFixit team also talks about a “test bed” that verifies FixBot’s answers against thousands of real repair questions asked and answered by humans. This additional level of fact-checking should reduce the number of false positives.
However, as iFixit acknowledges, it’s not a perfect tool: “FixBot is an artificial intelligence, and AI sometimes makes mistakes.” Time will tell how easy it will be to spot these errors, but users of the chatbot are encouraged to upload their own documents and solutions to address any gaps in FixBot’s knowledge.
Using FixBot to diagnose problems.
iFixit says FixBot will be free to all users for a limited time. A free version with limitations will be available at some point, along with paid plans offering a full suite of features, including voice input and document upload support. You can try it out right now on the iFixit website .
I didn’t want to intentionally break one of my devices just to have FixBot help me fix it, but I tested it on a few issues I’d encountered (and successfully resolved) in the past. One of them was a completely failed SSD that was preventing my Windows PC from booting. I started with a vague description of why my computer wasn’t starting properly, and the bot did a good job of identifying the problem and offering solutions.
The program checked everything I’d already tried when the problem occurred, including a system restore and command line troubleshooting. Finally, thanks to several links to repair guides on iFixit, it concluded that my SSD was damaged due to a power outage—something I already knew.
I also tested the bot by asking a more general question about random phone reboots—I had a similar issue with one of my older phones. Again, the answers were accurate, and the suggested troubleshooting steps were quite logical. I was also directed to the iFixit guide for my phone model.
The bot is as enthusiastic as many others currently available (I was regularly praised for the “excellent information” I provided), and it seems to genuinely know what it’s talking about. This is one scenario where generative AI demonstrates its value, processing large amounts of information based on natural language queries.
This certainly has potential: compare this approach to manually sifting through dozens of forum posts, online articles, and documents. However, there’s always the nagging feeling that the AI is making mistakes, as the warning on FixBot’s screen suggests. I’d recommend checking other sources before taking any drastic hardware troubleshooting steps.