If you’ve been dreaming about spending your summer whispering sweet nothings into the digital ears of one of the seductive ChatGPT voice assistants that OpenAI showed off last month, you’ll have to dream a little longer. On Tuesday, the company announced that its “advanced Voice Mode” feature needs more time in the oven “to reach our bar to launch.” The feature will be available to a small group of users to gather feedback, and then launch to all paying ChatGPT customers in the fall.
“We’re improving the model’s ability to detect and refuse certain content,” OpenAI posted on X. “We’re also working on improving the user experience and preparing our infrastructure to scale to millions while maintaining real-time responses.”
We’re sharing an update on the advanced Voice Mode we demoed during our Spring Update, which we remain very excited about:
We had planned to start rolling this out in alpha to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users in late June, but need one more month to reach our bar to launch.…
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) June 25, 2024
Voices have been a part of ChatGPT since 2023. But last month, OpenAI demoed an upgraded version that sounded so humanlike it drew comparisons with Samantha, the seductive voice assistant in the 2013 movie Her, played by Scarlett Johansson. Weeks after the presentation, the actress accused OpenAI of copying her voice despite denying permission.
OpenAI said it’s still figuring out when the new voices (minus the Johansson soundalike) will roll out to paying users this fall. Another feature that lets the voice assistants use your phone’s camera to understand the world around you has also been delayed until that time. “Exact timelines depend on meeting our high safety and reliability bar,” the company said.
