Users will have the ability to pick from five different voice options, which are Sky, Ember, Breeze, Juniper, and Cove. — AFP
OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT's voice chat feature will now be available to all mobile users for free.
The feature, which first debuted back in September alongside image recognition, has only been available to users on the paid subscription plans for the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot prior.
Those on the mobile app can engage in voice conversations with ChatGPT by simply pressing the "headphone" icon beside the chatbox in the app. This can be done in both existing and new conversations.
The app will then start detecting a user's voice and respond via text-to-speech.
Following that, the conversation can be done entirely through voice, with responses from both the user and ChatGPT being recorded as text in the chat as if it was a regular conversation.
These voice conversations can also be held while the app is running in the background.
Users will have the ability to pick from five different voice options, which are Sky, Ember, Breeze, Juniper, and Cove.
While the speech settings menu does have the option to select "Malay" as the main language, speech detection in the language does not appear to be as accurate as in English from LifestyleTech's testing.
The text-to-speech is still capable of providing respondes in Malay, though only if the question is properly detected, otherwise the response will be in English and likely irrelevant to the question asked.
The feature's availability was announced amidst turbulence in OpenAI's leadership, where Sam Altman, one of the company's founders, had been ousted, followed by talks on his possible return and subsequent announced hiring by Microsoft.
