ChatGPT talks just like humans with new voice feature, and we are smitten

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

Here’s a look at this nifty feature, coupled with a walkthrough on how to get started with it.

How to use ChatGPT’s voice chat feature

Accessing the voice feature is a breeze. Simply fire up the ChatGPT app, and you’ll spot a headphones icon in the bottom right corner. It’s important not to confuse this with the voice input feature, which merely translates spoken words into text. When you launch voice chat for the first time, you’ll be prompted to choose a voice for the AI chatbot from five unique options, each with very different voices and tones.

You can access voice chats through the headphones icon. (Image: Zohaib Ahmed/The Indian Express)

OpenAI has gone to great lengths to ensure the app remains as conversationally adept as possible. Once you launch the voice mode – which, by the way, boasts a completely different interface from the standard chat window – ChatGPT virtually turns into this person you can talk to completely hands-free, almost like you are on a call. This means there’s no need to press any buttons to speak – ChatGPT will patiently wait for your turn once it finishes its part.

You can even exit the app and continue the conversation while performing other tasks on your phone, which can be a game-changer for times when, for instance, you’re reading an article and want additional context at the same time.

However, the experience isn’t entirely seamless. Depending on the complexity of your request, the AI might need some time to ponder and generate a response. Simple greetings like “Hi, how are you doing” fetch quick replies, but prompts such as “Read out today’s news” may require up to half a minute.

The interaction feels extremely natural. (Image: Zohaib Ahmed/The Indian Express)

But the most impressive bit of this feature is how natural the interaction feels. The AI’s delivery is anything but dull – it appears to fine-tune its talking style to match the flow of the conversation, outshining the likes of Siri and Google Assistant in terms of naturalness by a mile. We’re quite smitten with it and wouldn’t mind seeing an option to make this voice assistant the default on our phones. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to expect this in the future.

When you’re done with the conversation, you can exit it to find a ‘transcription’ for it in the chat window.

It’s fair to say that the introduction of ChatGPT’s voice chat opens up a bunch of innovative ways for users to interact with AI, which weren’t possible through text chat alone. Imagine the AI as a culinary guide, reading out recipe steps for your cooking queries, all while keeping your hands free for the actual cooking. Or maybe helping users with language learning, where the AI assists users in practising speaking and listening in various languages, providing immediate feedback. The possibilities are endless.