ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak!

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is getting a major update that will enable the viral chatbot to have voice conversations with users and interact using images, moving it closer to popular artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like Apple’s Siri.

The voice feature “opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications”, OpenAI said in a blog post on Monday.

We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT. These features will offer a new, more intuitive type of interface by allowing you to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about.

Voice and image give you more ways to use ChatGPT in your life. Snap a picture of a landmark while traveling and have a live conversation about what’s interesting about it. When you’re home, snap pictures of your fridge and pantry to figure out what’s for dinner (and ask follow up questions for a step by step recipe). After dinner, help your child with a math problem by taking a photo, circling the problem set, and having it share hints with both of you.

Since its debut last year, ChatGPT has been adopted by companies for a wide range of tasks from summarizing documents to writing computer code, setting off a race amongst Big Tech companies to launch their own offerings based on generative AI. Cyber criminals are also using this technology to spruce up their phishing email attacks.

Spotify is using the power of this technology for the pilot of their Voice Translation feature, which helps podcasters expand the reach of their storytelling by translating podcasts into additional languages in the podcasters’ own voices.

The new ChatGPT features will be released for subscribers of its Plus and Enterprise plans over the next two weeks and they expect to roll out these capabilities to other groups of users, including developers, soon after.

In related news:
Amazon will invest up to $4bn in San Francisco-based AI firm Anthropic, mirroring the earlier tie-up between Microsoft and OpenAI. It’s the latest multi-billion-dollar investment in the race among the big tech firms to exploit the potential of artificial intelligence.

US authors George RR Martin and John Grisham are suing ChatGPT-owner OpenAI over claims their copyright was infringed to train the system. Martin is known for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted into the HBO show Game of Thrones.

ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) “learn” by analyzing massive amounts of data often commonly sourced online. Intellectual property laws will be one of the first legal tests of this ground-breaking technology.

Read OpenAI’s entire blog post here – you can also sample some of the voices ChatGPT will be using:
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak