The days of an interactive, almost-human virtual assistant could be coming sooner than you think.
Tech company OpenAI has unveiled the latest update to ChatGPT, which now includes a voice mode that allows users to communicate more conversationally with the AI system. In a video posted Monday on X by OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, company officials ask ChatGPT to tell them a bedtime story involving robots and romance.
“Ooh, a bedtime story about robots and love?” ChatGPT responds in a female voice. “I’ve got you covered!”
The system proceeds to tell a story about a curious robot “in a world not too different from ours,” and then pivots to different voices when company officials periodically interrupt to ask it to speak more dramatically, in a robot-like voice or in a sing-song way.
The new update, known as GPT-4o, got comparisons to the 2013 Spike Jonze movie “Her,” starring Joaquin Phoenix, in which a lonely man falls in love with his virtual assistant Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Even Altman appeared to refer back to the film, saying in a blog post that it “feels like AI from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real.”
“Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change,” he wrote.
Previous versions of ChatGPT were text-based, with users typing questions to the system. Past attempts to make the system give more human-like responses beyond simple fact regurgitation were largely rebuffed by ChatGPT.