OpenAI Gives ChatGPT a Voice

OpenAI is giving its ChatGPT a voice for verbal conversations. The company yesterday in a blog post revealed that it will be rolling out voice in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks. Voice is coming on iOS and Android.

With the new capability, ChatGPT users will be able to use voice to engage in a back-and-forth conversation with the assistant.

To get started with voice, users head to Settings, then New Features on the mobile app, and opt into voice conversations. Then, they tap the headphone button located in the top-right corner of the home screen and choose their preferred voice out of five availablevoices. The voice types are Juniper, Sky, Cove, Ember, and Breeze.

The new voice capability is powered by a new text-to-speech model, capable of generating human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech. OpenAI collaborated with professional voice actors to create each of the voices, which also uses Whisper, OpenAI's open-source speech recognition system, to transcribe spoken words into text.

"The new voice technology—capable of crafting realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech—opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications. However, these capabilities also present new risks, such as the potential for malicious actors to impersonate public figures or commit fraud," OpenAI said in the blog post. "This is why we are using this technology to power a specific use case—voice chat."

OpenAI also announced that Spotify will be the first company to use the ChatGPT voice technology for the pilot of itsVoice Translation feature, which helps podcasters expand the reach of their storytelling by translating podcasts into additional languages in the podcasters' own voices.