OpenAI Commences Voice Assistant Roll Out to Paid Users

OpenAI has rolled out the new voice assistant feature on ChatGPT. The company is already providing the OpenAI voice assistant paid in advanced voice mode. According to Yahoo Finance, the AI startup released the voice assistants four months after it unveiled the feature at its launch event.

Custom Instructions

The ChatGPT AI voice assistant feature comes with two additional capabilities- memory and custom instruction storage. OpenAI says its voice assistant will be able to store instructions and remember the behavior that users want to exhibit. This is very similar to the features that the company rolled out early in the year for ChatGPT’s text version.

ChatGPT has also expanded the voice range in the new feature by adding five new voice styles. This means users can use the chatbot by speaking a prompt, instead of typing it. Users know they have accessed OpenAI’s voice assistant for paid users when they see a popup on the app.

“Since the alpha, we’ve used learnings to improve accents in ChatGPT’s most popular foreign languages, as well as overall conversational speed and smoothness. You’ll also notice a new design for Advanced Voice Mode with an animated blue sphere,” the AI startup said.

OpenAI’s voice assistant is only available on the ChatGPT-40 model. Users can leverage its memory and custom instructions capabilities to personalize their interactions and responses based on their preferences.

The Rollout Plan

OpenAI plans to bring its humanlike, conversational voice interface to paying customers gradually. For starters, the feature will be available in the US. The OpenAI ChatGPT voice assistant will be available to ChatGPT team service and ChatGPTPlus subscribers over the next few days. The AI startup plans to make the feature accessible to Edu and Enterprise users in the coming week.

OpenAI first piloted the voice assistant in May of this year to show how fast it responds to visual and written prompts through voice. Although the company experienced delays in launching the solution to safety issues, OpenAI unveiled the voice assistant feature to selected ChatGPT Plus customers in July 2024.

The startup said its AI assistant product would not impersonate people’s voices. The company also said that it had added new filters to ensure the software can spot and refuse some requests to generate music or other forms of copyrighted audio.

OpenAI Controversies

OpenAI’s voice assistant has been controversial from the onset. When the AI startup unveiled the voice mode, similarities between the Sky voice and that of Scarlett Johanssen. Though the company denied these allegations, the issue sparked concerns regarding AI developers mimicking voices of known individuals.

“We tested the model’s voice capabilities with external red teamers, who collectively speak a total of 45 different languages, and represent 29 different geographies,” OpenAI said to reporters.

But the new ChatGPT AI voice assistant does come with all the capabilities that OpenAI showcased during the launch. The chatbot can’t access computer-vision features that provide audio feedback to users through smartphones.

OpenAI has been developing new products for months now. In July of this year, OpenAI commenced testing its AI-based search engine, SearchGPT. Once completed, SearchGPT will draw answers from different web sources and give users timely responses to queried questions. Although OpenAI is testing the search engine, the AI startup plans to integrate the tools into ChatGPT.