For ChatGPT Plus subscribers, OpenAI’s new sophisticated voice mode is beginning to roll out to a limited group of users. OpenAI unveiled the functionality at its GPT-4o launch event in May, but it was later postponed for safety concerns after receiving backlash for sounding too much like Scarlett Johansson.
The new speech mode at OpenAI’s event seemed to be significantly more capable than ChatGPT’s existing voice option. Employees of OpenAI were allowed to stop the chatbot onstage and request that it tell a tale in a different way. The chatbot was receptive to these disruptions and modified its responses accordingly.
In order to “reach our bar to launch,” OpenAI postponed the release of the advanced mode by one month, which was originally scheduled for alpha release in late June. The business stated that it was “improving the model’s ability to detect and refuse certain content” as part of the delay. More than one hundred external red team members were used to evaluate the voice model’s capabilities, according to OpenAI spokesman Taya Christianson. This halt might have been the proper decision, given the corporation has recently been under intense criticism about its safety procedures. Additionally, according to Christianson, OpenAI “added new filters that will recognize and block certain requests to generate music or other copyrighted audio.”
One of the main complaints of the new mode during OpenAI’s event was how much Johansson’s onstage voice, “Sky,” resembled the AI character in the film Her. Although the voice was present in ChatGPT before to OpenAI’s spring demo, the voice was removed by the firm just before Johansson disclosed that she had written to OpenAI to inquire about the voice’s creation. “We’ve made it so that ChatGPT cannot impersonate other people’s voices, both individuals and public figures, and will block outputs that differ from one of these preset voices,” Christianson adds, describing that the new mode of ChatGPT would only employ four preset voices that it created with voice actors.
Christianson claims that OpenAI intends to roll out the new mode to every ChatGPT Plus subscriber in the fall.