OpenAI Unveils Advanced Voice Mode with New Features

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it will release Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) to more members of ChatGPT’s paid user base

Customers in the Plus and Teams plans will be the first to get the audio feature, which makes ChatGPT more normal to talk to. Next week, Enterprise and Edu users will be able to log in.

AVM is getting a new look as part of the rollout. The feature is now shown as an animated blue sphere instead of the animated black dots that OpenAI showed in May during its technology demo.

Users will see a pop-up next to the voice icon in the ChatGPT app when AVM is ready for them.

Users can also try out five new sounds in ChatGPT. They are Arbor, Maple, Sol, Spruce, and Vale. With this addition, ChatGPT now has nine voices, almost as many as Google’s Gemini Live. The other voices are Breeze, Juniper, Cove, and Ember. All of these names may come from nature. This is because AVM’s whole point is to make ChatGPT feel more natural.

One voice that isn’t here is Sky, which OpenAI showed off during its Spring Update and earned Scarlett Johansson a court threat. The actress, who played an AI system in the movie Her, said Sky’s voice sounded a bit too much like her own. OpenAI quickly took down Sky’s voice, saying it wasn’t meant to sound like Johansson’s, even though some staff members were tweeting about the movie then.

OpenAI added video and screen sharing to ChatGPT in its Spring update four months ago, but it’s not part of this rollout. That feature is meant to let GPT-4o process both sound and sight simultaneously. A member of the OpenAI team showed me how to use ChatGPT to ask real-time questions about math on paper or code on my computer screen. Currently, OpenAI is not giving a date for when these multimedia features will be available.

However, OpenAI says it has made some progress since the limited alpha test of AVM was made public. The company that makes ChatGPT says that its voice feature can now help people understand accents better and that talks run more smoothly and faster. We ran tests with AVM and found that bugs were frequent. The company says that this has been fixed.

OpenAI is also adding some of ChatGPT’s customizable features to AVM. These include Custom Instructions and Memory. Custom Instructions lets users change how ChatGPT reacts to them, and Memory lets ChatGPT remember conversations to use later.

A representative for OpenAI says that AVM is not yet available in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein, among other places.