OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#31

Post by raverbashing » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:18 PM UTC

martypitt wrote: post #3

> Advanced Voice is not yet available in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. That's disappointing. I wonder if it's related to legal issues, technical issues, or just doing a phased rollout?

I initially thought this had to do with regulation as well, but people trying it over a VPN are complaining about latency, which makes me believe there's a technical (deployment regions) reason for it as well

(Also language reasons as well - though it seems it works with other languages)

How well does it work in the UK (and understanding its regional accents?)

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#32

Post by ben_w » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:18 PM UTC

guappa wrote: post #22

lynx23 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... you instantly know they're up to no good. You're refering to the EU here, right?

No. Not that everything they do is good. But something being illegal in the EU is a bad indicator for sure.

On privacy, I agree.

AI it's harder to say, especially with the attitudes of the people making it being a split personality mix of "wow this is incredible it might kill everyone" — that's enough of a surprise to legislators that I don't know what to predict nor who has the right approach from USA (e/acc), EU (conservative), China (not sure, suspect 'harmonious' but acknowledge I'm projecting a national stereotype).

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#33

Post by CubsFan1060 » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:21 PM UTC

throwaway13337 wrote: post #28

I'm in europe and was able to accesss the feature with a VPN. Surprising that there isn't a 'hey siri' for chatgpt yet. Obviously, that would make this sort of feature infinitely more useful. This is what monopoly gatekeeping looks like. The limitations in this feature show the problems with both EU proactive regulation and US underregulation. Bad regulation has become the biggest issue standing in the way of useful…

I dunno, it's a single button press on my phone to access it. That seems plenty fine to me.

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#34

Post by isodev » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:26 PM UTC

martypitt wrote: post #3

> Advanced Voice is not yet available in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. That's disappointing. I wonder if it's related to legal issues, technical issues, or just doing a phased rollout?

Or perhaps it’s just not that good with other languages and accents.

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#35

Post by hentrep » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:27 PM UTC

throwaway13337 wrote: post #28

I'm in europe and was able to accesss the feature with a VPN. Surprising that there isn't a 'hey siri' for chatgpt yet. Obviously, that would make this sort of feature infinitely more useful. This is what monopoly gatekeeping looks like. The limitations in this feature show the problems with both EU proactive regulation and US underregulation. Bad regulation has become the biggest issue standing in the way of useful…

>Surprising that there isn't a 'hey siri' for chatgpt yet

Sort of a middleman approach and certainly not perfect, but you can invoke ChatGPT with Siri using Shortcuts.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7993358-chatgpt-ios-app-...

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#36

Post by crimsoneer » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:27 PM UTC

martypitt wrote: post #3

> Advanced Voice is not yet available in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. That's disappointing. I wonder if it's related to legal issues, technical issues, or just doing a phased rollout?

Given it includes the UK, I assume it's GDPR (and probably linked to the provenance of training data?) rather than any new AI act stuff.

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#37

Post by walthamstow » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:28 PM UTC

jacooper wrote: post #9

M4v3R wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely legal issues, probably the same reason Apple is not rolling some of the new features like Apple Intelligence in iOS 18 to EU. [0] https://www.macworld.com/article/2374452/apple-intelligence-...

I don't believe this, gpt4o and chatgpt is already available in the EU. Adding advanced voice mode doesn't change anything.

It doesn't have to change anything. OpenAI are doing it for political reasons

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#38

Post by layer8 » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:29 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #18

M4v3R wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely legal issues, probably the same reason Apple is not rolling some of the new features like Apple Intelligence in iOS 18 to EU. [0] https://www.macworld.com/article/2374452/apple-intelligence-...

> Apple Intelligence was only ever going to support American English this year anyway, with other languages coming in 2025 and beyond. That would somewhat limit its effectiveness in the EU to begin with ... Their AI product wasn't ready for other languages, not even British English where the DMA definitely doesn't apply. A person would have to be very naive to believe Apple directly here. They just want to generate b…

Apple will be rolling out AI in Switzerland but not in the EU, despite shared sets of languages.

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#39

Post by crimsoneer » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:29 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #21

jsheard wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of EU laws were copy pasted into UK law to expedite Brexit, so it may be that whatever they're blocked by still applies.

Brexit was finalised in 2021. AI legislation came into vogue 2023 onwards. If there's UK legislation blocking this, then it's entirely on the UK.

I think highly likely this is just good old GDPR. Specifically, any personal data used to train the model (which would include any person recording on any audio clip or present in any picture) would have to consent for their personal data being used for the purpose of training OpenAI's model, which they pretty emphatically do not.

Re: OpenAI rolls out Advanced Voice Mode with more voices and a new look

#40

Post by danielbln » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 12:29 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #26

zurfer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand how (a) discoverability and (c) recoverability are a problem, but what do you mean with (b) efficiency? Most people talk faster than they can type.

But that assumes that the speech recognition is perfect. Which at least for those of us speaking non-US English is never the case. And you have only to ring your bank and try and transfer money between accounts with it reading out every account number and asking for confirmation every step of the way. Versus a few clicks with a mouse to see that for almost all operational tasks voice is cumbersome and inefficient.

Whisper is incredibly robust, with a vast amount of language. I use it in German as well as English and it's incredibly reliable. Modern, transformer based ASR is a different ballgame.