After much wait, OpenAI has finally begun rolling out its highly anticipated Advanced Voice feature to all Plus and Team users in the ChatGPT app. The rollout is expected to be completed over the course of the week, with notifications appearing in the app once access is granted.
The new feature introduces five distinct voices along with support for over 50 languages, allowing users to hear responses in different accents. Advanced Voice now also includes the ability to customise instructions, a feature that allows for greater personalisation. Users can set specific preferences for how the AI interacts via voice, enhancing the overall experience.
While Advanced Voice offers a range of improvements, it is currently unavailable in the European Union, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein.
This rollout follows several key updates to the ChatGPT app, including the addition of Custom Instructions, Memory, and enhanced voice accents.
OpenAI released GPT-4o at its latest Spring Update event earlier this year, which won hearts with its ‘omni’ capabilities across text, vision, and audio. OpenAI’s demos, which included a real-time translator, a coding assistant, an AI tutor, a friendly companion, a poet, and a singer, soon became the talk of the town. However, its Advanced Voice Mode wasn’t released.
OpenAI is not Alone
Recently, Kyutai, a French non-profit AI research laboratory, launched Moshi, a real-time native multimodal foundational AI model capable of conversing with humans in real time, much like what OpenAI’s advanced model was intended to do.
Hume AI introduced EVI 2, a new foundational voice-to-voice AI model that promises to enhance human-like interactions. Available in beta, EVI 2 can engage in rapid, fluent conversations with users, interpreting tone and adapting its responses accordingly. The model supports a variety of personalities, accents, and speaking styles and includes multilingual capabilities.
Meanwhile, Amazon Alexa is partnering with Anthropic to improve its conversational abilities, making interactions more natural and human-like. Earlier this year, Google launched Astra, an ‘universal AI agent’ built on the Gemini family of AI models. Astra features multimodal processing, enabling it to understand and respond to text, audio, video, and visual inputs simultaneously.
