ChatGPT can now respond with spoken words

ChatGPT has attracted hundreds of millions of users since it was introduced late last year. Photo / Jackie Molloy, The New York Times

ChatGPT has learned to talk.

OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup, released a version of its popular chatbot on Monday (Tuesday NZT) that can interact with people using spoken words. As with Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and other digital assistants, users can talk to ChatGPT, and it will talk back.

For the first time, ChatGPT can also respond to images. People can, for example, upload a photo of the inside of their refrigerator, and the chatbot can give them a list of dishes they could cook with the ingredients they have.

“We’re looking to make ChatGPT easier to use — and more helpful,” said Peter Deng, OpenAI’s vice president of consumer and enterprise product.

OpenAI has accelerated the release of its AI tools in recent weeks. This month, it unveiled a version of its DALL-E image generator and folded the tool into ChatGPT.

ChatGPT attracted hundreds of millions of users after it was introduced in November, and several other companies soon released similar services. With the new version of the bot, OpenAI is pushing beyond rival chatbots such as Google Bard, while also competing with older technologies such as Alexa and Siri.

Over the next two weeks, OpenAI said, the new version of the chatbot would start rolling out to everyone who subscribes to ChatGPT Plus, a service that costs US$20 (about NZ$34) a month. But the bot can respond with voice only when used on iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

Though ChatGPT’s voice interface is reminiscent of earlier assistants, the underlying technology is fundamentally different. ChatGPT is driven primarily by a large language model, or LLM, which has learned to generate language on the fly by analysing huge amounts of text culled from across the internet.

As OpenAI is transforming ChatGPT into something more like Alexa or Siri, companies such as Amazon and Apple are transforming their digital assistants into something more like ChatGPT.

Last week, Amazon previewed an updated system for Alexa that aims for more fluid conversation about “any topic”. It is driven in part by a new LLM and has other upgrades to pacing and intonation to make it sound more natural, the company said.

Apple, which has not publicly shared its plans for how it will compete with ChatGPT, has been testing a prototype of its large language model for future products, according to two people briefed on the project.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Cade Metz, Brian X. Chen and Karen Weise

Photograph by: Jackie Molloy

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