OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company, is introducing several key new features to its ChatGPT AI model.
OpenAI is the artificial intelligence program that exploded in popularity earlier this year, but it’s been limited to text-based communication since its launch. While it’s continued to see massive updates (such as the transition from ChatGPT 3.5 to 4.0), it hadn’t received any features to communicate outside of text, until now.
“ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak,” OpenAI said in its newest blog post.
Over the next two weeks, OpenAI is rolling out voice and images for ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users. You can now have full conversations with ChatGPT using a synthetic voice as well as send images right in the chat.
“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 writes.
Its blog provides a sample audio — while it is still somewhat robotic, it’s significantly more
lifelike than many text-to-speech applications.
Images can also now be sent right into the chat and ChatGPT will analyze it in an attempt to understand what you’ve sent it. You can send anything from paintings to informative graphs and ChatGPT will recognize it and be able to incorporate it into the chat.
You’ll be able to opt-in to the new voice feature through the settings menu once it’s released.
Note that while images will be available on all platforms, only Android and iOS will have voice capabilities. There are still some limitations, however. ChatGPT still has trouble processing languages besides English and shouldn’t be depended on for high-risk activities.
OpenAI plans on expanding these features gradually, to avoid potential risks.
“We believe in making our tools available gradually, which allows us to make improvements and refine risk mitigations over time while also preparing everyone for more powerful systems in the future.“