ChatGPT with Voice made me forget I was talking to an AI

Opinion post by

Calvin Wankhede

Imagine this: you’re walking down the street wearing earbuds with your phone locked away in a pocket. You speak a few sentences when a thought crosses your mind, and within seconds, hear a response. Not from a friend or a stranger, but from ChatGPT. It feels like a genuine phone call — a seamless and natural interaction as if you’re actually talking to a person. Sounds far-fetched? I’d have agreed only a few weeks ago but I had that exact scenario play out just last week, all thanks to ChatGPT’s new voice conversations feature.

Your mind has probably jumped to Siri or Google Assistant, but ChatGPT with voice transcends those in just about every way. Activating the latter starts a continuous, bi-directional audio stream between your phone and OpenAI’s servers. This means you can have long back-and-forth conversations, without any wake words. More impressively, though, ChatGPT’s five voices are all remarkably human-like. They pause, take deep breaths, and some even interject in the occasional “umm” or “uhh” for that extra touch of realism.