Ex-OpenAI president Greg Brockman — who, as far as we’re aware, isn’t currently employed at OpenAI in any capacity — is posting updates about OpenAI products on X, including one today about ChatGPT’s voice narration feature being made available to all ChatGPT users.
Perhaps Brockman’s simply expressing pride in his colleagues’ work. Perhaps the job offer from Microsoft fell through. Perhaps negotiations with OpenAI’s board of directors to bring him and Sam Altman — who was OpenAI’s CEO until Friday, when the board abruptly sacked him — back are further along than was reported. (Brockman resigned in protest Friday evening.) Who knows? At this stage in chaotic OpenAI saga, it’s anyone’s guess.
OpenAI’s existential crises aside, the aforementioned voice feature for ChatGPT — which was announced in September and began rolling out to premium subscribers of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, a few weeks ago — is powered by a text-to-speech model that can generate human-like voices from text and just a few seconds of sampled speech. OpenAI said that it teamed up with established voice actors to create five different voices, with its open source Whisper speech recognition system used to transcribe verbal utterances into text.
To activate the voice feature, users can head to the settings menu in the Android or iOS ChatGPT apps and tap the “headphones” icon.