OpenAI launches Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new appearance

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) to more ChatGPT paying customers. The audio feature makes chatting more natural in ChatGPT and will initially be rolled out to ChatGPT Plus and Teams customers. Businesses and Edu customers will start access to access next week. As part of the launch, AVM improves the design. The feature is now represented by a blue animated sphere, rather than the animated black dot that OpenAI showed off when it demonstrated the technology in May.

ChatGPT also gets five new voices for users to try out: Arbor, Maple, Sol, Spruce, and Vale. That brings the total number of votes for ChatGPT to nine (almost as many as Google Gemini Live), along with Breeze, Juniper, Cove, and Ember. You might notice that all these names are inspired by nature, probably because the whole point of AVM is to make using ChatGPT more natural. 

There is one voice missing from this lineup, and it was the voice that OpenAI showcased during the spring update, which led to legal threats from Scarlett Johansson. The actress, who plays an artificial intelligence system in the feature film She, claimed that Sky's voice sounded a little too similar to her own. The Open quickly reduced Sky's voice and said it was never intended to suffer Johanson's voice, although several employees mentioned the film in a tweet.

This time another feature was started: ChatGTT video and screen sharing first appeared in the spring update four months ago. This feature should allow the GPT-4o to process visual and auditory information simultaneously. During the demo, the OpenAI staff will show you how to ask ChatGPT real-time math questions on a piece of paper in front of you, or write code on a computer screen. Currently, OpenAI has not provided a timeline for when these multimodal capabilities will be implemented.

However, OpenAI says it has made some improvements since AVM's limited alpha testing release. ChatGPT's voice feature now reportedly understands accents better, and the company says its conversations are smoother and faster, too. In our testing with AVM, we found that errors were not uncommon, but the company claims that this has now been improved. 

Openai also extended some custom features of chatgpt to AVM: Customized Description, which allows users to customize how Chatgpt reacts to them and makes memory (allows chatgpt) to refer to the conversation in the future. Openai spokesman said that AVM in several regions, including the European Union, Britain, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, has not yet delivered.