As OpenAI struggles to maintain balance amidst a sea of questionable decisions, the company has decided to release ChatGPT Voice – the virtual assistant that sounds impossibly real – to the public for free.
ChatGPT Voice has been around since late September and offers a unique AI experience. Imagine talking to a virtual assistant that didn’t sound robotic or offer extremely simple responses to complex questions. Beyond that, the voice assistant pulls its spoken content from AI responses, which are inherently pulled from ChatGPT’s LLM system.
OpenAI – the company responsible for ChatGPT – is announcing the release of ChatGPT Voice to users for free. The feature was originally locked behind a paywall seemingly until the unsettling feature was ironed out for the public to use in the ChatGPT app on Android and iOS.
Users who want to try ChatGPT Voice out can access it in the app now. To start a back-and-forth conversation with the AI language model, users can hit the headphones icon. By speaking and initiating a conversation, ChatGPT Voice will be triggered and respond in kind.
We praised OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice feature when it was first announced for its impressively human-like appearance. AI chatbots were garnered as futuristic because they could take on a written conversation and reply in a human-like manner. Somehow, unexpectedly, the audible version of ChatGPT is even more life-like, with emphasis and strain on all the right places.
The ChatGPT Voice feature is accomplished with a library of sounds recorded by voice actors. With that sample library, OpenAI was able to develop a model that pieces words and language nuances together in a realistic way.
The timing couldn’t be worse
The decision to release this feature was likely planned much in advance. However, the timing is inarguably bad. OpenAI is in the midst of an executive crisis, with CEO Sam Altman being fired on a whim. What followed was an exodus of three senior researchers in support of Altman, with an outpouring of support threatening the company with an even larger exodus if Altman wasn’t rehired.
With the threat of shattering a company that has only just begun to flourish in the tech industry, the board tried to bring Altman back, but Microsoft quickly snatched him up for an “advanced AI research team.”
The result of this action on the board’s part has snowballed into a mass request for the entire OpenAI board to resign. An astonishing 700 of 770 employees have since signed this request.
Update 11/22: OpenAI has since rehired Sam Altman as CEO with a new board of directors.
While ChatGPT Voice is a very cool feature, it just has us thinking, “Maybe this could have waited a week or two?” In any case, things still aren’t quite settled at OpenAI, and now ChatGPT has a new (unsettling) feature.
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