Now you can speak to ChatGPT — and it will talk back

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN

(CNN) — You can now speak aloud to ChatGPT and hear the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot talk back.

OpenAI, the startup behind the wildly-popular chatbot, announced Monday that it is rolling out new features including the ability to let users engage in a back-and-forth voice conversation with ChatGPT.

In a company blog post Monday, OpenAI teased how this new feature can be used to “request a bedtime story for your family, or settle a dinner table debate.”

The new voice features from OpenAI carry similarities to those currently offered by Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri voice assistants.

In a demo of the new update shared by OpenAI, a user asks ChatGPT to come up with a story about “the super-duper sunflower hedgehog named Larry.” The chatbot is able to narrate a story out loud with a human-sounding voice that can also respond to questions, such as, “What was his house like?” and “Who is his best friend?”

ChatGPT’s 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,” Open AI said in the blogpost. The company added that it collaborated with professional voice actors to create the five different voices that can be used to animate the chatbot.

OpenAI also said on Monday that it’s rolling out a new feature that lets the bot respond to prompts featuring an image. For example, you can snap a picture of the contents of your fridge and ask ChatGPT to help you come up with a meal plan using the ingredients you have. Moreover, the company said you can ask the chatbot to focus on a specific part of an image with its “drawing tool” in the app.

The new features roll out in the app within the next two weeks for paying subscribers of ChatGPT’s Plus and Enterprise services. (Subscriptions to the Plus service are $20 a month, and its Enterprise service is currently only offered to business clients).

The updates from OpenAI come amid an ongoing AI arms race within the tech sector, initially spurred by the public launch of ChatGPT late last year. In recent weeks, tech giants have been racing to roll out new updates that incorporate more AI-powered tools directly into their core products. Google last week announced a series of updates to its ChatGPT competitor Bard. Also last week, Amazon said it was bringing a generative AI-powered update to its Alexa voice assistant.

The-CNN-Wire
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