OpenAI on Wednesday, 30th of October announced the launch of its Advanced Voice feature in PCs and Macs through an X (formerly Twitter) post. The post says “Big day for desktops. Advanced Voice is now available in the macOS and Windows desktop apps.” revealing the promised features on the ChatGPT desktop app.
The new Advanced Voice feature was previously available as a mobile-only feature and the new updation of ChatGPT to be compatible with the desktop app also comes with a compact, floating window mode instead of the old full-screen mode.
The Advanced Voice Mode was earlier announced during OpenAI’s Spring Update in May and clarified through a later X post that the official rollout of the feature won’t happen until this year’s fall saying that “exact timelines depend on meeting our high safety and reliability bar.”
The Spring Update revealed its latest large language model (LLM), GPT 4o, making it fully multimodal and creating a desktop app. OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati said at the event, “We’re looking at the future of interaction between ourselves and the machines, and we think that GPT 4o is really shifting that paradigm into the future of collaboration, where the interaction becomes much more natural.”
One of the major announcements previously made on the voice feature on desktops is now going live. Speaking directly with ChatGPT without using text is now possible with this new feature. The conversations are made natural and feel like talking with another person and not with the system. Users can stutter, stop, and add exclamatory remarks while talking if needed and the responses will also be natural in this manner. Even sharing emotions as if to a friend is possible.
Today’s updates on ChatGPT other than Advanced Voice mode are the availability of OpenAI o1-preview and o1-mini on the macOS ChatGPT app. These new models of ChatGPT can solve complex tasks, mathematical problems, scientific equations, and coding. The response animation is also improved with a fade-in effect.
There are many additional fixes and improvements included in the latest ChatGPT update. The new update has many added features like a preference to open chat links in the browser, notifications to let the user know when the answers are ready after generating in the background, which is useful for reasoning models, added support for Apple Handoff between iOS and macOS, finding text within a conversation with the shortcut Command + F or the app menu, and ability to restore draft messages. The update has fixed some bugs around the keyboard focus, improved the accessibility support on conversations, and boosted the performance of launching the app and scrolling in conversations.
The more natural voice feature on ChatGPT was previously released in late September and an optional conversational mode was available on Mac. However, the Advanced Voice mode was only available on the ChatGPT mobile app till now. On Mac, the ChatGPT with its Advanced Voice mode can coexist with Siri.
The long-awaited voice feature, after the initial announcement was released to beta testers in July and later to premium subscribers in September. Later another X post from the company said that free users will also get a sneak peak of the Advanced Voice. The feature was later made available for ChatGPT Plus subscribers and became a hit and sensation within this short period.
People commented about the feature that it is wild. The Advanced Voice Mode comes in a wide variety of voices and regional accents with natural breath breaks during long conversations. The feature became so popular that other AI tech giants like Meta and Google came up with conversational features.
This feature reveal comes the very next day after the company announced the new chat history search feature.
