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It may have been a chaotic week at OpenAI, but the company has somehow still found time to roll out a product. “ChatGPT with voice” is available to free users of the ChatGPT app. This feature launched for paying users in September, and if you haven’t heard, it’s a full-blown voice assistant. The feature is still slowly rolling out to devices; on my Android phone, I don’t have a “headphone” icon anywhere, even with a Plus subscription.
When you have the feature, you can open the app, press the “headphone” icon, ask a question, and a stilted robot voice will read out a reply. It’s just like the voice assistants from Apple, Amazon, or Google, but this one is powered by a large language model. ChatGPT’s voice model is purely a question-and-answer type of voice assistant, though. Usually, these things are handy for what they can do on your behalf—make a phone call, control a smart home, take a note, or make a calendar appointment—but this can only answer questions.
ChatGPT with voice is now available to all free users. Download the app on your phone and tap the headphones icon to start a conversation.
Sound on 🔊 pic.twitter.com/c5sCFDAWU6
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 21, 2023
Google and Amazon are rebooting their voice assistants to use large language models, so ChatGPT’s voice functionality is definitely a preview of the future. The demo about buying pizza for a large group is more complicated than the current Big Tech voice assistants can handle. ChatGPT’s response is also longer-winded than most voice assistants, giving a 66-word, 23-second answer describing the imagined pizza-eating scenario in excruciating detail.
If you’re interested in chatting up ChatGPT, the voice feature should be rolling out to iOS and Android devices now.
