OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT includes five new voices — Vale, Spruce, Arbor, Maple, and Sol.
OpenAI’s new voice feature will not be available in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, and more
Photo Credit: Pexels/Shantanu Kumar
OpenAI rolled out the Advanced Voice Mode feature to all the paid users of ChatGPT on Tuesday. The feature was first unveiled at the OpenAI Spring Updates event in May and was touted as a human-like voice chat experience where the artificial intelligence (AI) can express emotions, modulate the voice, and react to what the user is saying. In July, the real-time response feature was rolled out to select paid users, but now it is being made available to all ChatGPT Plus and Teams users, except in Europe.
In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), the official handle of OpenAI announced the new feature and shared details about it. The feature is being integrated within the ChatGPT app on Android and iOS, but it will not be available on the web. The AI firm said once the feature has been rolled out to users, they will get a notification about it.
ChatGPT app users will find the option to turn on the Advanced Voice Mode by tapping the waveform icon placed next to the text field. Tapping on the icon activates the new voice mode. Users now have five new voices to choose from — Vale, Spruce, Arbor, Maple, and Sol. Each of these voices has a different pitch, tonality, and regional accent.
Additionally, the Advanced Voice Mode also offers a custom instructions feature. In this, users can add information about themselves that they want the AI to remember. Once the information has been added to the text field, ChatGPT will remember it and all of its responses will be contextualised.
Notably, OpenAI was the first AI firm to announce this feature, however, Google was able to introduce a similar feature dubbed Gemini Live, before the ChatGPT maker. While the reason for this is not known, the company now says that it took this extra time to improve the “conversational speed, smoothness, and accents in select foreign languages.”
While the feature is available in multiple regions across the globe, the company confirmed that it will not be introduced in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. This is likely because of concerns of regulatory authorities over privacy and data collection.
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