OpenAI Continues to Blur the Human-Robot Boundary

ChatGPT will soon be able to see, hear and speak. OpenAI, the founder of the wildly-popular chatbot, announced this week that it is adding several new capabilities to ChatGPT, such as giving users the option to have voice conversations with the AI tool and to include images in their conversations. 

The new voice function will let users select one of five lifelike voices and functions similar to Alexa or Siri, but is powered by a more advanced large language model (LLM), allowing users to hear similar responses to those that ChatGPT would generate through its text chat function. Examples of the new features were shared in the announcement and can be viewed here.

The new features will be made available over the next few weeks to Plus and Enterprise subscribers (Plus subscriptions are $20 per month and the Enterprise service is currently only available in corporate plans). 

OpenAI’s announcement occurred on the same day Amazon agreed to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s largest competitors. Amazon’s initial investment will be $1.25 billion in exchange for a minority stake in Anthropic with an option for Amazon to increase its investment to $4 billion. This adds an interesting wrinkle to the generative AI battle between Google (Bard Chatbox), Microsoft (OpenAI) and other tech giants.