On Monday, OpenAI unveiled a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot that can receive and respond to voice commands, images, and videos. The new app, based on an A.I. system called GPT-4o, is capable of processing audio, images, and video much faster than previous versions of the technology. The app will be available for free on smartphones and desktop computers, marking the company’s move towards combining conversational chatbots with voice assistants like Google Assistant and Siri. OpenAI plans to gradually share the technology with users over the coming weeks, making it the first time ChatGPT is available as a desktop application.
During an event streamed on the internet, OpenAI demonstrated the capabilities of the new app, which can respond to conversational voice commands, analyze math problems from a live video feed, and create playful stories on the fly. While the new app cannot generate videos, it is able to produce still images representing frames of a video. ChatGPT, introduced in late 2022, showed that machines can handle requests more like humans by answering questions, writing term papers, and generating computer code, all based on vast amounts of text data from the internet, including Wikipedia articles and chat logs.
The combination of chatbots with voice assistants presents challenges, as chatbots can be prone to errors and “hallucination,” where they make up information. Despite this, companies like OpenAI are working to develop A.I. agents that can reliably handle tasks such as scheduling meetings and booking flights. The new app from OpenAI is based on a single A.I. technology, GPT-4o, which can process text, sounds, and images more efficiently than previous models. By consolidating these capabilities into one technology, the company can offer the app to users for free, enhancing the natural dialogue experience between humans and machines.
As Apple and Google integrate chatbots into their voice assistants, OpenAI’s innovation of turning a chatbot into a voice assistant demonstrates the evolution of human-machine interaction. The convergence of chatbots with A.I. image, audio, and video generators represents a step towards more sophisticated A.I. capabilities. The company’s introduction of ChatGPT as a desktop application signals a broader effort to combine conversational chatbots with voice assistants across all products. OpenAI’s new app showcases the potential for machines to handle tasks in a more human-like manner, responding to voice commands, analyzing visual data, and generating content on demand.
OpenAI’s technology is the result of analyzing vast amounts of internet data, enabling chatbots like ChatGPT to learn and generate responses based on text prompts. By leveraging multimodal A.I., which incorporates sounds, images, and video, companies like OpenAI are pushing the boundaries of what chatbots can accomplish. While challenges remain in ensuring accuracy and reliability, efforts are underway to enhance chatbots into capable A.I. agents that can perform a wider range of tasks. The collaboration between chatbots, voice assistants, and other A.I. technologies represents a new era in human-machine interaction, where natural dialogue and seamless interaction are at the forefront of innovation.
