Ever since OpenAI showed off ChatGPT’s new voice mode — drawing the ire of Scarlett Johansson — fans of the AI assistant have been eager to try the feature out. Well, they’ll have to wait a little longer, because OpenAI says the enhanced voice mode has now been delayed.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI explained that it had delayed the alpha test for its amazingly lifelike voice mode by a month so it could focus on “improving the user experience” and the “ability to recognize and reject certain content.” In other words, OpenAI isn’t quite ready for the questionable requests the real world might throw at the company.
So when exactly will Voice Mode roll out beyond this initial “small group of users”? OpenAI says, “We plan for all Plus users to have access in the fall.” There is a slightly worrying caveat, however: “Exact timelines depend on us maintaining our high security and reliability standards.” So further delays could well be on the horizon.
We’re releasing an update to the enhanced voice mode that we demoed during our Spring Update and remain very excited about: we had planned to make this available as an alpha to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users in late June, but we still need a month to reach our launch level. …25 June 2024
This is all a far cry from OpenAI’s previous rollout plans. When the company showed off the new voice mode at its spring event in May, it said the feature would be “rolling out in the coming weeks.” That’s still technically true, but in reality it will now be more like months.
Delays in new technical features aren’t exactly new, but ChatGPT subscribers aren’t happy about it. “The biggest scandal in history,” concluded one X commenter, while others stated that the big demo “was probably misleading for many” and that they would also cancel their Plus account until the feature actually rolls out.
A victim of the AI arms race
ChatGPT fans’ frustration over this delay of voice mode may seem disproportionate, but it’s also understandable. An unfortunate side effect of the AI arms race is the staging of super demos with optimistic rollouts, followed by delays and vague promises of launches in the “coming weeks” or, even worse, “coming months.”
OpenAI’s explanation for the delays in ChatGPT’s most exciting new feature certainly makes sense at first glance. As the statement explains, the new voice mode brings us closer to natural, real-time conversations with AI chatbots – and that’s a potentially dangerous tool if it goes awry in practice.
On the other hand, the timing of OpenAI’s Spring Update event – on May 13, just one day before Google IO 2024 – seemed convenient to steal the show from Google’s AI announcements, so theories that ChatGPT’s new voice was a little premature have some credibility.
OpenAI has released several demo videos (like the one shown above) of the new voice mode on its YouTube channel (featuring the controversial voice “Sky” after Scarlett Johansson complained that it sounded a little too much like her AI character in Her), suggest that this is far from being a vaporware product.
Even without this feature, ChatGPT remains one of the best AI tools on the market, despite increasing pressure from, for example, Claude’s new 3.5 Sonnet model.
