OpenAI recently announced an expansion of its Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) for ChatGPT, bringing the feature to more paying customers. Starting Tuesday, users with ChatGPT Plus and Teams subscriptions can access this enhanced audio capability. Enterprise and educational users will gain access in the coming week.
The rollout introduces a fresh design for AVM, featuring a blue animated sphere that replaces the previous black dots. Users will see a notification pop up next to the voice icon in the ChatGPT app when AVM becomes available to them.
New Voices
OpenAI has added five new nature-inspired voices to ChatGPT: Arbor, Maple, Sol, Spruce, and Vale. These join the existing voices – Breeze, Juniper, Cove, and Ember – bringing the total to nine options for users to choose from.
The company reports several improvements since the initial alpha test of AVM. They claim the system now has better accent recognition and offers smoother, faster conversations. While previous tests revealed occasional glitches, OpenAI states these issues have been addressed.
OpenAI is integrating some of ChatGPT’s customization features into AVM. Users can now utilize Custom Instructions to personalize ChatGPT’s responses and take advantage of the Memory feature, which allows ChatGPT to recall and reference past conversations.
It’s worth noting that some previously announced features are not included in this rollout. The video and screen sharing capabilities showcased earlier this year, which would allow ChatGPT to process visual and audible information simultaneously, are still in development. OpenAI has not provided a timeline for the launch of these multimodal features.
Currently, AVM is not available in several regions, including the European Union, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. OpenAI has not specified when these areas might gain access to the feature.
