After a 2-month-long delay due to copyright issues, the highly anticipated feature is now live for select ChatGPT Plus users….
Remember the 2013-movie ‘Her’ starring Joaquin Phoenix? The story revolves around a lonely, introverted man going through a painful divorce. In a bid to fight loneliness, he purchases an advanced operating system that would evolve and adapt to the user’s needs. The OS – called Samantha with a voiceover by Scarlett Johansson – is a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence. During his conversations, Phoenix’s character Theodore Twombly develops an emotional bond with Samantha and eventually falls in love with her.
The movie explores complex themes of love and loneliness in the digital age. It questions the very definition of consciousness and what it means to connect with another being – whether it is human or digital. Long story short, it explores the evolving relationship between humans and technology.
Well, from the looks of it, this sci-fi movie is set to become a reality. Because OpenAI has recently launched its latest version, ChatGPT-4o that is faster than GPT-4 and has improved capabilities across text, voice and vision. And most importantly, it has made its Advance Voice Assistant feature live for a select group of GPT Plus users.
The plan is to monitor the interactions and eventually roll out the feature to all Plus users by September 2024.
The Controversy that Delayed the Launch
It seems like the makers of the Advanced Voice Assistant feature were very inspired by the aforementioned movie because during the initial launch of the feature in May this year, the company was accused of mimicking Johansson’s voice for its preset voice called Sky.
The actress had earlier been approached to lend her voice for the feature but after much thought and deliberation, had declined to do so citing ‘personal reasons’. She wasn’t happy that the company had gone ahead and used her voice against her wishes and her lawyers had claimed that she was ‘shocked and angered‘ by this development.
After heavy backlash, the company was forced to withdraw the feature and return 2 months later with updated voices. It now has 4 versions – Juniper, Breeze, Cove and Ember – which uses the voices of paid actors.
OpenAI seems to have learnt their lessons from the copyright infringement as they have also restricted GPT-4o from using copyrighted audio, including music. Record labels are notorious for their legal action and have already sued a bunch of AI music generators.
Which explains why OpenAI is choosing to play it safe.
How AVA is different from other Voice Assistants
For starters, ChatGPT-4o’s Advanced Voice Assistant feature can handle complex questions and provide personalized responses. But the more exciting feature is that its Omni capability that allows you to converse with it through text, voice and visuals. With the user being able to share photos and videos with the AI through screensharing, the exchange is a lot more seamless and interactive.
ChatGPT now supports over 50 languages including several Indian languages and to make the conversation feel a lot more natural, it even behaves like a human. For instance, its tone changes depending on the topic and can even get breathless while talking fast. It laughs and also makes sounds like um and ah midsentence to make it seem like you’re talking to a fellow human. You can also interrupt the conversation midway just like you can interrupt a friend while they’re talking.
With the 4 different voiceovers available, each user can choose the voice that he or she likes best.
What the Future Holds
If you’re an AI geek, there is a lot to get excited about! Because OpenAI is working on several other cool AI tools. They recently introduced SearchGPT which is a new AI feature to make it easier for users to find information on the internet. This will soon be integrated as a part of ChatGPT.
Apart from that, OpenAI is also working on a new AI video generator called Sora. This will make creating videos a lot more fun and easier for users.
So, from the looks of it, the age of AI is well and truly underway and it’s just a matter of time before these features and tools become commonplace!
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