Advanced Voice’s arrival makes ChatGPT more sci-fi-like than ever

OpenAI just announced via X/Twitter that the Advanced Voice feature is finally being released to ChatGPT. This exciting update allows users to have more natural spoken-language conversations with the chatbot, bringing us yet another step closer to Her becoming reality.

Advanced Voice isn’t just “ChatGPT with text-to-speech” — it uses its underlying GPT-4o technology to analyze the tone and speed of your voice and pick up on non-verbal cues like body language, then itself responds with emotion in its own voice.

With five new voices, ChatGPT feels more alive than ever. The responses come faster so it feels like you’re holding a real-time conversation, and the update improves accents in (certain) non-English languages. Other improvements include the ability to provide custom instructions with Advanced Voice and memory that persists through a conversation.

Advanced Voice is currently rolling out to all paid subscribers on ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Team plans, but it excludes users in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. (As of this writing, a subscription to ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month and grants access to special features like this along with faster response times.)

Advanced Voice is only available when using the ChatGPT app on iPhones and Android devices, and only in app versions 1.2024.261 and later.

If you’re a paid subscriber but don’t have access to Advanced Voice yet, give it a few days. You’ll receive an app notification when the feature rolls out to you, at which point you can start using it right away.

“[It] makes you realize how unnatural typing things into a computer really is,” wrote OpenAI’s Greg Brockman in an X/Twitter post.

Further reading: ChatGPT has its own AI search engine now