Back in March, I proclaimed that the proliferation of LLMs and ChatGPT would lead to a hands-free internet that is led by voice interactions. It appears that online commentary is now catching up to this idea.
OpenAI has recently made Voice Conversations available to Plus subscribers on its mobile app, allowing users to effectively speak to ChatGPT and have it respond back conversationally. Yes, this HER future we’ve all been dreaming of has arrived, but did we think it would come so quickly?
On the podcast This Week in Startups, Jason was shown how to use the new voice conversation feature with ChatGPT, providing a glimpse into how conversational AI could play out in the future. While the demo itself was clunky, with long pauses that tried Jason's patience, it was entertaining to see Sunny apparently setting his AI to sound uncannily like Scarlet Johansson. See the interaction below:
And at Meta's Connect 23 event last week, Zuckerberg announced Meta AI, which features a number of celebrities and athletes portraying archetypal personas for conversational AI interactions across Meta's social apps. In their words:
We’re introducing Meta AI in beta, an advanced conversational assistant that’s available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, and is coming to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3. Meta AI can give you real-time information and generate photorealistic images from your text prompts in seconds to share with friends. (Available in the US only)
This hands-free future is unfolding before our eyes. Although there are still some user interface kinks to work out, the underlying computing challenges have been solved. How long before we’re chatting effortlessly with AI assistants during our daily commutes and throughout our everyday lives?
