AI: OpenAI ChatGPT Sees, Hears & Speaks
...moving towards a second 'ChatGPT moment'
ChatGPT is on the move. Its parent, OpenAI may have beat multiple trillion dollar companies to the punch. As I’ve discussed earlier, Apple, Amazon, Google have been racing to add LLM AI capabilities to their multi-billion dollar ‘Voice Assistants’.
But OpenAI is rolling out a ‘Voice Assistant’ via ChatGPT in the coming days that may be as positively reviewed as the first ChatGPT moment that turbo-charged the current AI Tech Wave.
Oh, and the new ChatGPT will also have those ‘multimodal’ capabilities to see via the camera that I discussed a few days ago. As the NYTimes explains:
“A new version of OpenAI’s popular chatbot behaves a lot like Siri and Alexa. You can talk to it — and have a conversation.”
“ChatGPT has learned to talk.”
“OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, released a version of its popular chatbot on Monday that can interact with people using spoken words. As with Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and other digital assistants, users can talk to ChatGPT and it will talk back”
“For the first time, ChatGPT can also respond to images. People can, for example, upload a photo of the inside of their refrigerator, and the chatbot can give them a list of dishes they could cook with the ingredients they have.”
“We’re looking to make ChatGPT easier to use — and more helpful,” said Peter Deng, OpenAI’s vice president of consumer and enterprise product.”
“OpenAI has accelerated the release of its A.I tools in recent weeks. This month, it unveiled a version of its DALL-E image generatorand folded the tool into ChatGPT.”
While this race to ‘augment’ LLM AIs with voice has long been anticipated, it seems startingly impressive in the initial reviews. Joanna Stern at the WSJ describes it as follows:
“You’ll have two reactions to hearing my conversation with the now-vocal ChatGPT:”
“1) Holy crap! This is the future of communicating with computers that sci-fi writers promised us.”
“2) I’m building an underground bunker and stockpiling toilet paper and granola bars.”
“Yes, OpenAI’s popular chatbot is speaking up—literally. The company on Monday announced an update to its iOS and Android apps that will allow the artificially intelligent bot to talk out loud in five different voices. I’ve been doing a lot of talking with ChatGPT over the past few days, and testing another new tool that lets the bot respond to images you show it.”
And then after some more deep breaths:
“Think Siri or Alexa except…not. The natural voice, the conversational tone and the eloquent answers are almost indistinguishable from a human at times. Remember “Her”? The movie where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI operating system that’s really a faceless Scarlett Johansson? That’s the vibe I’m talking about.
“It’s not just that typing is tedious,” Joanne Jang, a product lead at OpenAI, told me in an interview. “You can now have two-way conversations.”
No extra hardware or gizmos needed besides a smartphone, iOS or Android. The review above has some video demos that are worth watching to understand the experience.
No Echo with Alexa, Google Nest Hub, or Apple HomePod with Siri. Those can come later from third parties with ChatGPT with Voice built in by third parties.
As the MIT Technology Review underlines:
“OpenAI is sharing this text-to-speech model with a handful of other companies, including Spotify. Spotify revealed today that it is using the same synthetic voice technology to translate celebrity podcasts—including episodes of the Lex Fridman Podcast and Trevor Noah’s new show, which launches later this year—into multiple languages that will be spoken with synthetic versions of the podcasters’ own voices.”
“This grab bag of updates shows just how fast OpenAI is spinning its experimental models into desirable products. OpenAI has spent much of the time since its surprise hit with ChatGPT last November polishing its technology and selling it to both private consumers and commercial partners.”
“ChatGPT Plus, the company’s premium app, is now a slick one-stop shop for the best of OpenAI’s models, rolling GPT-4 and DALL-E into a single smartphone app that rivals Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa.”
So Amazon, Google, and Apple have their work cut out for them with Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri. And a voice conversing ChatGPT also takes some wind out of the sails for Meta’s expected rollout of AI ‘Smart Agent’ Chatbots via Instagram and other Facebook properties at their Developer conference Connect later this week.
LLM AI chatbots now have a lot more ways for more mainstream users to try and see what they can do. There will be ups and downs. And regular users will have to check their instincts to not assume greater Intelligence than the ARTIFICIAL intelligence in current and coming LLM AI technologies, as I outlined in “Don’t Anthropomorphize the AIs”.
Easier said than done. We’re human after all. But we’re in for a new phase where computers can potentially help us create and reason better than before. Stay tuned.
(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)