OpenAI announced via Twitter on Tuesday that it will begin rolling out its Advanced Voice feature, as well as five new voices for the conversational AI, to subscribers of the Plus and Teams tiers throughout this week. Enterprise and Edu subscribers will gain access starting next week.
Advanced Voice is rolling out to all Plus and Team users in the ChatGPT app over the course of the week.
While you’ve been patiently waiting, we’ve added Custom Instructions, Memory, five new voices, and improved accents.
It can also say “Sorry I’m late” in over 50 languages. pic.twitter.com/APOqqhXtDg
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 24, 2024
Advanced Voice, which runs on the GPT-4o model, allows users to forgo written text prompts and speak directly with the chatbot as they would another person. It was first announced at OpenAI’s Spring Update event and released to a select group of ChatGPT Plus subscribers to beta test the system in July. Now, every paying subscriber will be able to try the feature for themselves.
The company also unveiled five new voices for the chatbot: Arbor, Maple, Sol, Spruce, and Vale (you can listen to them right now). They’ll be available in both Standard and Advanced Voice modes, joining the four voices — Breeze, Juniper, Cove, and Ember — that ChatGPT already offers. OpenAI also noted that, while video and screen sharing are not currently supported in Advanced Voice, those capabilities will roll out at a later date.
What’s more, OpenAI is incorporating a pair of tools to grant Advanced Voice capabilities more in line with the rest of the text-based chatbot experience: memory and custom instructions. When it first debuted, Advanced Voice could only reference information from the chat it was currently having. With the memory function, the AI will be able to recall details from previous conversations as well, reducing the need for users to repeat themselves. Similarly, custom instructions are designed to set ground rules for the model to follow when generating its responses. For example, you could dictate that any coding-based responses be presented in Python.
Plus and Teams subscribers will receive an in-app notification when the feature goes live on their account. Unfortunately, Advanced Voice is not available in the EU, the U.K., Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein.
ChatGPT isn’t the only AI that can converse directly with its users. Tuesday’s announcement comes less than a fortnight after Google released its Gemini Live to all users — including those on the free tier.