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

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

#41
post #7

> 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?

When something is not available in EU, you instantly know they're up to no good. edit: Sorry if privacy hurts your feelings, people who downvote me.

Mario Draghi - EU central bank president - created a huge report for the EU that was just published. He singled out overregulation as a key issue in european progress.

Specifically, the report called out GDPR costing small businesses 'more than' 15% of their profits.

This is indeed quite a hurdle. Privacy isn't really the issue - it's regulation that understands that complexity has a cost. We, as developers, should understand the deep, deep cost of complexity.

As a business owner that respects privacy a great deal, GDPR and regulation like it are still an immense hurdle - the cost in understanding and in doing things to the letter of the law is, I think, hard to grasp from the outside. Regulations occupy a huge amount of space in my head that was previously filled with making a better product.

PDF available here:

https://commission.europa.eu/topics/strengthening-european-c...

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

#42
post #19
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.

Not sure if there are any policy makers reading this in the UK but if this isnt fixed people like will move to the states. I just don't understand why there just cant be an opt-in.

But nobody knows what "this" is, which is kind of a problem - Anthropic are releasing models in the UK but not EU, and GPt4 is available in both, so it's not really clear if it's a legal decision or a comms one.

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

#43
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well the. Surely OpenAI just need to make a consent popup for the UK they should do that asap

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

#44

I was hoping to find a voice like Microsoft's "Guy" (a name, not referring to the gender) or Google Assistant's "Pink". An unambiguously white, masculine, American "radio voice" or "audiobook narrator" voice. ChatGPT describes this as "A rich, deep, and smooth tone that is pleasant to listen to for extended periods. This often comes from good control over pitch and timbre, creating a voice that resonates well." If yo…

Overheating issue is interesting. For me, driving is the key use case for voice bots. I want to have a free flowing conversation with an AI assistant while I’m driving alone. I want it to tie into my work systems so I can dig through the CRM, draft documents, and handle email.

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

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It needs to be perfect. Every single time.

Because voice interfaces don't have the equivalent of a delete key or allowing the user to quickly select a different option.

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

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well the. Surely OpenAI just need to make a consent popup for the UK they should do that asap

The blocker definitely isn't the current users of the application, but all the people involved in the creation of the training data.

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

#47

I have played with it for 20 minutes and here’s my review: 1. The low latency responses do make a difference. It feels miles better than any other voice chat out there. 2. Its pronunciation is excellent and very human like but it is not quite there. Somehow I can tell instantly that it’s a chatbot, it feels firmly in the uncanny valley. 3. On the same note if I was on call and there was a chatbot on the other side of…

I think the uncanny valley feeling is going to be there no matter what they come up with. I, and therefore my brain, knows the voice is coming from a soulless machine[1] so it'll always feel a little off.

My perfect voice assistant would sound like Auto from Wall-E, which is supposedly a blend of MacOS' Ralph and Zarvox voices. Along the lines of (bear in mind I just wrote this directly into the terminal and didn't spend any time actually blending them lol)

  say -v ralph -r 180 "I'm sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that" & ; say -v zarvox -r 180 "I'm sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that"
And yeah I'm almost convinced that the whole voice interaction thing came about because they interact with the computer in Star Trek using voice commands.. which is probably just because watching someone type everything into a keyboard would be some boring telly.

I assume there are folks that do use it and do like it, but do they like it more than just pressing buttons to do things? No worries of being misinterpreted or having to speak like a robot at Alexa because it's failed to turn the lights off 3 voice commands in a row now. It's awesome for accessibility, don't get me wrong, I'm talking in the sense of the primary and most commonly used interface.

[1] Not a criticism, fellow soulless machines.

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

#48
post #35

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-...

Interesting, do you know whether this can invoke Voice Mode?

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

#49

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…

̶H̶o̶w̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶?̶ ̶I̶'̶m̶ ̶t̶r̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶M̶u̶l̶l̶v̶a̶d̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶O̶S̶ ̶V̶P̶N̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶.̶ ̶D̶i̶d̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶p̶a̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶s̶u̶b̶s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶a̶ ̶U̶S̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶d̶i̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶r̶d̶?̶

Nevermind, I deleted and re-installed the app on iOS while on VPN and now it works!

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

#50
Interesting that the release comes a day after Google's new models [1]. Seems a bit like strategical timing :) Maybe they waited until some of the competitors release something so that they can upstage his release with theirs?

____

[1] Which, btw, I think deserve better sentiment. On benchmarks, the new Gemini Pro seems to be better than GPT-4o. It's just not so hyped...

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