I had preview access to this one for a few weeks. It's very good. I had one conversation that lasted a full hour while I was walking the dog, got some good brainstorming done against one of my projects.
The best feature is that it can delegate questions out to GPT-5.5 in the background, so you're no longer restricted to a voice model that's several years behind the frontier.
I did report a fun bug with it though: it was interrupting me and laughing at my (not really intended as) jokes while I was still talking! They seem to have clamped that behavior down thankfully, it felt a bit rude and condescending.
Is it responsive to personality settings? I actively don't want fake AI girlfriend, but I do get a ton of value out of voice mode. Looking forward to trying this but hoping it's not a creepy overdone mess (like Sesame). Expectations are they'll keep doubling down on fake AI girlfriend approach because the thing I want probably wouldn't drive engagement anywhere nearly as well
I have my Chat personality settings stripped right down to no-fluff. I'd want voice to be more akin to the Star Trek computer, and less akin to as you said an AI friend, but previously it was tuned too personable/friend-like.
Star Trek computer voice model is something I have yet to encounter, and I've looked repeatedly :) It's not about a specific voice, it's the fact they managed to capture "I am a utility" perfectly in the voice. Our modern friends do not want to be thought of as a utility, but to engender trust and agency all of their own and that's a huge problem for me.
Prompt text: There are 14 varieties of tomato soup available from this replicator. With rice, with vegetables, Bolian style, with pasta specify hot or chilled.
I think the request here is not about sounding like Majel Barrett but in keeping the output extremely terse and unobtrusive.
There's been a few studys showing that novices love LLM output that's long, but experts hate it. As an example, I've been tasked with using some agentic PM tool to write specs, and it keeps generating these huge page long outputs with "HBR voice" bolded summaries of paragraph long bulletpoints. I.e.:
> Right-size hard, and watch the one open-ended edge. Endorse the DRI's simplifications wholesale: drop the runbook-per-alert mandate (keep 1–2 diagnostic-only runbooks for the high-priority set), and ride durability on the existing weekly incident + monthly operational reviews — no new governance. The single scope-creep risk is the coverage strand (gaps are defined by absence); bound it to gaps evidenced by real, already-missed customer-facing outages, not a proactive gap hunt. Curing ownership gaps (e.g. foo-bar, no clear owner) is finite in-scope work.
There's dozens of these every iteration. I can't imagine trying to deal with that via voice, I would just zone out after the second sentence.
I'm just going to say, Wow. That's a pretty incredible result. I had no idea you could clone a voice with such a short snippet of audio these days.
I've had this dream of talking to the Enterprise-D computer since I was 8 years old. Midlife-crisis me still has that dream, but hooked up to Home Assistant so it can actually do useful things too. A couple months back, I went looking around for "clean" samples of Majel's voice as the computer but didn't have a lot of luck. Even though there are three television series and several movies, pretty much all of them have some amount of background noise, bleeps, bloops, or warp core thrum. (As this one does.) There may be modern ways to clean those up without affecting her voice much, but I haven't dug into that yet.
There are a few audiobooks narrated by Majel Barrett but obviously her role as the computer was proper voice acting and so the books would not be good source material.
There were also a few games/CD-ROM (Omnipedia) with some samples, but they did not bother to post-process them for that lofi Enterprise-D computer feel. Can _probably_ be replicated fairly faithfully after the fact, but I only know a _little_ about audio post-processing.
According to her son (Rod Roddenberry), Majel sat down in a studio and recorded audio samples specifically for the purpose of having her voice cloned someday for future Star Trek stories. However, those haven't been released publicly. (And likely never will, but I can dream, can't I?)
Edit: I played with your samples and the time it takes to generate the output audio is pretty brutal. Too slow for interactive use. Maybe that's a limitation of the HF-hosted app, though.
If you read their GitHub README and the code, it's possible to separate and cache the voice cloning step, and they have some streaming variant with low first chunk latency. I only played with it via Hugging Face. It is astonishingly good with certain rare accents, and it responds well to longer input clips
I noticed that too, I guess the content in the training data suggests that when some text self-identifies as "cold, hard logic" it additionally assumes a mean tone. Additionally it makes responses more likely to disagree even when given inputs that are more or less valid. A while ago I tested out giving some idea to a model with the "hard logic" prompt, then taking its own output, reverting the conversation and giving it its own statement again, making it disagree with the very same statement it just made itself. This was mostly just humorous, and doesn't indicate too much, after all both statements might've been wrong in some way, but the statement itself was moreso an opinion with no fully right answer, showing this tendency to disagree.
I guess when we tell models to use "cold logic" they don't interpret that purely definitionally, but moreso with what this statement usually implies, which is often a disagreement between two people, one trying to leverage supposed logic to disagree and denigrate the other party, oftentimes actually arguing out of emotion and not the logic they claim to use. This probably occurs enough to give model responses a mean tint. That's my theory on why this could occur at least.
One popular speech synth from back in the day, I believe it was WillowTalk, had a voice called Colossus, which sounded like the voice module of the computer from Colossus: The Forbin Project. This voice was used for that of CATS in the famous "All your base are belong to us" Flash video.
Another WillowTalk voice was a clone of DECtalk's Perfect Paul good enough to be used as the voice in the MC Hawking rap recordings.
It came from a company called Willow Pond Software. That seems to narrow searches down.
WillowTalk is apparently still of interest to Half-Life modders because another WillowTalk voice, possibly a clone of DECtalk's Huge Harry, was used as the Black Mesa VOX facility-wide announcement system in the original Half-Life.
I think that's mostly just a frequency shift :) You could probably recreate it with another model and some effects on top. Also, why the hell not for voice mode haha.
I explicitly prompt my small local models to channel that kind of energy. It's one of few ways to get them to just spit it out without yapping on about temperature- and humidity-appropriate activities when I just asked if it'll rain this week.
You do have to do it carefully and not literally say "Star Trek" or else it'll start yapping about main shields being at full strength.
It’s 2026 what the customer wants is probably an indication of what not to do if you’re a hyperscaler.
Whoever ends up actually winning after the crash will be the ones who figure out the needs of users, not the needs of the financial machinations of the companies trying to grab land.
> "The best feature is that it can delegate questions out to GPT-5.5 in the background, so you're no longer restricted to a voice model that's several years behind the frontier."
Wow. That's exactly what I hoped they would do.
This issue has held me back from using ChatGPT's voice mode as much as I otherwise would have, because I also use it for brainstorming while commuting, exercising, etc., and don't want it to feel stuck in the past.
Funnily enough - I built this (delegation) over the weekend with Fable for a local voice chat running 100% on local LLMs, Parakeet and Kokoro. I say "...ask the thinking model..." and that redirects it to Qwen 3.6 27B on vLLM.
Can't claim originality though - it was inspired by Sesame - where their models will invoke a search, or check the weather etc, and make a vocalisation to keep you engaged.
Turn taking is one of the hardest things to get right for the exact reasons mentioned - but does seem to be the way that Claude.ai's voice works - in a very obvious way.
Anthropic + OpenAI both rug-pulled voices I liked and got used to and OpenAI really dumbed down their voices at the same time - Arbor went from Estuary English and almost "jack the lad" to some generic English accent. Claude had a Birmingham accent and said things like "shit", ending sentences like "So you're telling me that they asked for a 90% discount yeah?" - then it changed overnight to a mock Derbyshire accent with a dull tone.
ChatGPT's voice also gaslights me for conventional opinions - "my Eastern European neighbour helped me lift a wardrobe upstairs - something you just can't ask your typical neighbour neighbour"... then you get a full on left-leaning lecture from the safety layers rather than a head nod or "what luck!"
Claude + Sesame are nowhere near as overbearing.
In both cases - from edgy and engaging to something that just didn't gel.
The point of making my own assistant is that I can talk for as long as I want, episodic memory is personal and private, there's no "trust me bro, we're a big corporation" vibes.
This was not my first attempt - when I had a bunch of Opus credit around Jan/Feb - I tried really hard and created something that was not good enough. What I have now, is working, and each session is training Claude/Codex on what to tune, and to fix.
"Just had a convo - can you look into what happened?" And if it's one I don't mind sharing with the model - I'll say, "and what did you think of the questions I asked?" Sometimes it'll give a lovely commentary on how the model did.
af_heart is probably the smoothest voice - but yes it's more like another commented - more "StarTrek" than "telesales assistant that pauses and laughs at your jokes".
If you're on a similar path and want something full duplex - the go to solution is PersonaPlex from Nvidia based upon Moshi.
Seems a bit knee jerk. I go on walks and bike rides all the time. A couple of times I’ve used voice mode and it’s been interesting. I could have listened to music or a podcast, listen to YouTube or just unplug. But every walk is different.
If you’re uncomfortable with this new world, and I’m sure I am even as I participate, you could tell us more about that?
This may not be you, but the people who have said that to me irl walk significantly less than I do. And saying these things to people who don't yet exercise can make them far less likely to start as it's a far bigger step to do so. Podcasts and recorded lectures are what got me exercising in the first place, because I was excited to hear the next part. I now only have headprones on some of my walks, but the gateway drug of entertainment was a very useful stepping stone. And still often better than sitting at a desk.
It's coming from a place of objecting to burnout/overwork culture.
Recently I witnessed a CTO mention in a public channel that with Claude remote control people can now work while getting a coffee or other breaks during the day.
Tech is actively moving in a direction of destroying all the gains from the labour movement in service of enriching capital out of a combination of FOMO or fear of being replaced.
So yeah, when folks say "hey look now I can even work during leisure activities!" yeah, the reaction is negative.
>It's coming from a place of objecting to burnout/overwork culture.
Sure, but that's not everyone. I want this because it's hard to carve out time for my fun side projects. :)
Also, not everyone feels burnt out or overworked, and may find their actual work enjoyable. I've definitely had many showers where I've been thinking about interesting work problems and never felt particularly burdened by it (quite the opposite, in fact).
Workers in 2026, even non-tech workers have an easier life than workers alive at any other point in human history.
Yes ofc there are problems - collectivist land use laws that ban construction near homeowners continue to drive housing costs higher for example. But if you asked any worker today if they would have preferred to be alive 40 or 400 years ago I would be shocked if any said yes.
So I'm clear: as long as our jobs don't devolve to 100 hours a week in a sweat shop or tilling the earth for the lord of our fiefdom, we should just sit back and be happy?
Is that what I should take away from your comment?
Sure but context matters and given this is Hacker News, a lot of discussion centers around tech as a profession (and that's doubly true for AI adoption). You can forgive folks for jumping to natural conclusions. :D
It reminds me of that old parable where the acolyte asks the priest "Father, can I smoke while I pray?" and gets told "No, you should be focusing on praying. That wouldn't be respectful". But then he says "Can I pray while I smoke?" and gets told "of course, you can pray at any time".
If it's 'walking time', I probably don't want to consume that with work. But if it's 'working time', it could be great to have a nice walk during it.
Sometimes I want to learn something while I walk. Sometimes I want to listen to stories. Sometimes I want to just be present. All are good. I highly recommend letting people enjoy whatever they enjoy.
Given the personality type common on HN, I imagine that the GP, even if unplugged from all technology on their walk, wouldn't be in a mindful state of enjoying their surroundings, but rather would be "lost in the clouds", stewing on the same ideas/thoughts/problems; but with those thoughts going more in circles, due to a lack of ability to verify anything.
Literally me. Everyone is different, and that's fine. But I don't have the privilege of living in an area where I can talk to people about the things I am thinking through. It's very rural. Having a _utility_ that can act as a sounding board while I spew out my thoughts on a walk is a really meaningful improvement to my current situation.
there's no benefit to anyone for being so reductive, from whichever side you're on.
As a progressive person, the constructive thing is to try to see how to harness it for good or how to fight it, it's not to pretend that it's weak. It's not weak.
Not saying you aren't good at your job but this statement gives me pause. Given what I see on the daily as output from models I hope there's still a lot of human interrupt behind the wheel with respect to the design of drugs.
Every drug indeed has a huge burden of proof before it is distributed to humans, including the 3 levels of FDA clinical drug trials that cost billions of dollars, as well as all the internal testing we do beforehand.
Is it a dumb-down version of GPT like the current voice model? At least in french, I find the current GPT voice mode to be useless, to the point I only use the dication mode. I would ask a question and it would answer something along "That's a interesting question. I can help you with that. Anything you want to know about X?" I would ask again and it would answer the same kind of non answer.
> the answer is no it uses the latest gpt models now.
Actually it says it _can_ delegate to the latest models. Seems reasonable to ask how the voice model does when it doesn't delegate (or while waiting for the delegated answer).
I haven't stress-tested it, but I would imagine it approaches complex problems the same way a human with a phone in their pocket would — that is, by having a degree of awareness of the confidence it has in its own knowledge in some areas; where, when it "realizes that it doesn't know", it blocks the conversation with statements like "I don't know, let me check."
I say this because this is already how ChatGPT works internally when using its "auto" mode; the version of the "fast" model used in the "auto" mode does the same "notice your ignorance and bring in the heavy model" thing, just silently, rather than mentioning that it's doing it.
(If someone has actually run the experiment, please chime in!)
> I did report a fun bug with it though: it was interrupting me and laughing at my (not really intended as) jokes while I was still talking! They seem to have clamped that behavior down thankfully, it felt a bit rude and condescending.
Some times I'm still amazed that AI "gets" humour much more effectively than the character of Data did before his emotion chip, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4VZ5kQIdV0
Other times I'm amazed in the opposite way, that the script writers cover basically the same talking points about the character as we have today about LLMs, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBJCYHwyZhw
I love the UX of voice mode. I’ve always hated voice models.
Gemini’s being particularly egregious (always ending in some deranged question, can not reliably be prompted away) prompted me to build my own client for my real harness that simply does STT -> model -> TTS (both being independently useful).
I guess I see some value in a model responding quickly and with more nuance, but it’s not much. I can wait for it to finish. I’d much rather have it be actually useful. I’m not looking for a digital friend.
The delegation feature lets me see some value in a voice model for orchestration type features. But in either case, I don’t really like (or understand why others would like) talking to a model with different features and quirks just because I’m using a different medium to communicate over.
I’ve spent my time very similarly working on my own voice stack project, but having also seen how non-developers use AI or experience technology in general, I truly think they are better served with a different UX and product than what we have.
In other words, if you’re building your own voice inference tooling you’re just about the polar opposite user demographic than the one that truly needs and will value this. You’re using voice as a medium of convenience doing what existing models are technically and practically “shaped” to be able to do, knowing how they work well enough that conversation is more like typing/prompting with your voice than a natural interface. I’m guilty of this myself but have you ever even paid for a voice/audio model or hardware?
Compare that to the millions of people with an Alexa device in their home who buy products through it, or who prefer calling support to get a human over poring over technical documentation. They’re actually very close to finally getting a version of “Alexa” that lives up to its promise and I’m happy for them
I have built out something similar that let's me use my phone's hardware buttons to open an input stream with the mic for my Hermes agent over my matrix gateway and then has it play back with a local TTS model on my Pixel 10 Pro.
But the Deepseek v4 flash model I am using through OpenRouter is killing me on latency. Any suggestions to improve that?
I have friends who have brainstormed with an LLM (voice chat) for 10-30 minutes, and reported very positive experiences.
When I speak to one - while I'm impressed at how far they've progressed - the LLM just doesn't talk like someone I'd want to discuss a technical problem with (the way I would with a human).
(And my friends aren't even using a custom prompt - some of them are just talking to the default Gemini on their phone!)
I also love exploring ideas like this. The problem that made me stop using Gemini is that it would always try really hard against all my prompting to ask a stupid question at the end of its response that would completely derail my train of thought.
I had an enjoyable conversation with it just now where it repeatedly told me it had generated an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle along with a clickable data: link. Obviously, this is just harness polish. Overall, it's quite impressive.
Someday we'll have a tokeniser that works directly on human speech instead of doing speech-to-text and text-to-speech steps in between.
I didn't mean the "projects" feature. I described my projects to it, had it search for extra details and pasted relevant inflection into the session before starting the voice chat.
>The best feature is that it can delegate questions out to GPT-5.5 in the background, so you're no longer restricted to a voice model that's several years behind the frontier.
Ahh, this makes sense. I was wondering when they would start doing this. I stopped using voice mode all together because it was frustrating talking to a dumb AI, when most of the time I discuss things with Opus 4.8 or gpt 5.5.
I was working on a phone call agent recently, and thought about doing this. It makes sense
Does it have full access to your chat history, project files, etc? That's the biggest limitation I have with voice mode right now, if I ask it about something I chatted about before (even in the same conversation) it has zero recollection of it.
You can start a chat in an existing session after pasting data into that session and it can then talk about that content. I haven't tried it with projects.
Cool it sounds like they have improved. This the first time I tried back in the day voice chats were different and you could not get the transcript after the fact.
About 2 years ago I used to have conversations with GPT while walking the dog. It really emphasized the need to think before you speak, but you had to think fast before it hung up on you.
Dammit! I live in Europe and the cyber truck isn't even available here..
That said a huge pickup truck is about as far as you can get from a Camaro... Then again I'm not exactly David Hasslehoff myself either... Meh if it talks that's close enough!
That is a nice idea and all, but perhaps there are things our friends aren't good at talking about. Perhaps something that is very related to a work project? Or like when I go down the rabbit hole discussing quantum mechanics and astro physics with ChatGPT because none of my friends understand that at even my level, and I'm looking to learn more about it from someone/something that does know more than me.
I'm looking forward to trying this out because I find that doing discovery on certain things feels more natural with voice. The previous voice chat was such a dumb GPT-4 era model that I resorted to using the dictate feature with GPT-5.5 and had it read the text response back to me.
This is the opposite direction AI should be going. Human relationships are the most valuable thing we have, and so, naturally, technology seeks to intermediate and now replace them.
Most of what AI does is already in wrong direction. Not just human-to-human interaction, it took away thinking, creative work, sensory perception (glasses) and responses. People call it as helping humans, but I call it as sucking away the "human-ness" from humans.
After the damage is done, the mega corps would simply shrug and will say "Well, we were just responding to our business competition" The business knows no human-ness, because it is not a human. Businesses and machines are creatures that see humans as their fodder. And humans created these, assuming it is progress, to have businesses and machines. We call it progress because it required our mind power and it helped us to dominate other species. Dolphins are laughing at us.
I don't understand this line of reasoning. How are you hindered from doing any of those things? What part of "AI can now do X" makes it so you can't also do X?
Fewer people aren't staring into their phones or talking to them -- makes your social antennas pick up automatically on not wanting to disturb them (lest you draw their ire for not having the social antennas long enough to pick up on the fact they're "busy and don't want to engage with you" like a gymrat with AirPods to signal they're there to pump in peace and quiet listening to their favourite playlist, not talk to strangers). Happened to me already many times just with people scrolling their phone instead of talking and not wanting to talk in particular either, not to me at least. And no -- I am not talking about bothering strangers in the gym etc, I am talking about sitting at the lunch table where half of the people look into their phones -- they aren't actually interested in talking, it turns out.
Our devices have now increased the distance _between_ us -- it's not about _you_ being able to "do X" -- talking to others is not _you_ doing it, it's you _and the other person_ doing it _together_. You can't be doing anything together consentually when the other person is in the habit of talking with their AI, or doomscrolling for that matter.
Social people will be fine, I think this tech is far more important for lonely people who for any reason don't get to socialize much (if at all), this is especially common in older people. These people might not have any other alternatives.
> I think this tech is far more important for lonely people who for any reason don't get to socialize much (if at all), this is especially common in older people.
Uhm, those lonely people need to get out and start talking. How is this going to help society? This is going to make it worse.
Oh that kid is kinda quite and sad? Throw him an iPad. Oh that adult is kinda bored and wandering aimlessly? Throw him into a casino. Oh that adult is kinda lonely and feels like they don't have anyone they can talk to about their life? Give them LLM companionship.
Yep, it is over for humanity. People simply don't understand externalities.
What about people with disabilities, physical or mental, who can't get out, old people with no family or family who doesn't care? In theory it would be great if everyone got some attention and socialized, in reality a lot of people in society are forgotten, no one wants to talk to them.
For some of these people even talking to a robot would likely be a huge improvement in quality of life, and that's just talking. If said robots could also help them out in real life, sort of like a personal assistant, that would be even better.
Who’s paying for this? Nice sentiment, but last I checked prices weren’t coming down, and we’re talking about a cohort that doesn’t generally have a ton of extra cash.
These people are an opportunity for the rest of us to be better people, to show compassion and mercy. They are not worthless to the rest of society. Giving them LLM companions says that they are — that their only self-worth is their feelings.
> What about people with disabilities, physical or mental, who can't get out, old people with no family or family who doesn't care? In theory it would be great if everyone got some attention and socialized, in reality a lot of people in society are forgotten, no one wants to talk to them.
I mentioned in another comment that I totally get it for these people. You are using the extreme cases to justify opioid for the masses. The moment you "solved" human loneliness and interacting by giving them drugged up with chatbots, its over. I am telling you, it is over.
AI psychosis is bad enough as it is with really poor imitation. The moment it can imitate and fool the average person, I just don't see why most people need real friends anymore. We will NEVER be able to get it out of kids hand, the cats out of the bag. You think kids growing up with social media and ipad is bad? Lets see what happens if they live in actual fantasy land with their robotic friends.
I don't even know if I want to live in that world anymore.
Also, your solution to lonely people with disabilities or old age is to create robotic "Friends" for them? This is just sickening. You might as well just drug them. The _actual_ solution is to create a compassionate society where this doesn't happen. The solution to overworked society isn't more opium to relieve the pain.
Unironically just "man up". I get that there are some people that have actual sickness that prevents them from socializing but your little anxiety does not count. Believe me, I know I have the same problem. I quite literally had no friends for almost 7 years or after highschool. Society can't afford to babysit a 30 years old man that have anxiety and doesn't want to put any effort. My parent had to call me to check if I am alive, and even then, I don't feel like talking to them after months of no talking. I had zero interest to form any kind of relationship. That feeling that you have when you are feeling like "I would rather just order Uber", yea, you need to OVERCOME that. That is the effort. Ruminating, thinking and fantasizing about what "could have been" does not count.
Even if all I am saying is bullshit, "what is being done to help"? What about what is being done to make it way, way, way, way, way worse. If I had LLM companionship when I was alone, yea, I would have never gotten out of my shell. I would be stuck in there forever. Hell, why should I even talk to you? I should just argue with a robot instead.
There are still lots of social people. I found a lot of people actually do want to talk but are just shy.
I spent a few weeks at a hostel last year. It was always kind of depressing and tense in the shared kitchen, just this heavy silence.
I don't feel comfortable around strangers, so I solved that problem by just saying hi to everyone.
Most people didn't respond much, although most of them smiled and the tension was eased. But a few of them struck up conversation and we ended up making friends.
I ended up making like, ten new friends in two weeks. And then a bunch of them ended up becoming friends with each other as well.
This is an individual solution to a systemic problem. On a personal level, it is possible to solve such problems, but generally no, the ship has sailed quite some time ago (I personally think cars are to blame).
Even if you do it, you are still swimming against the current.
>This is an individual solution to a systemic problem. On a personal level, it is possible to solve such problems
I.e. it's only a problem if you're not willing to go and strike up conversations with people. Which is not AI or mobile phones' fault. Expecting society to come up with "systemic situations" to your personal problems is a fast path to a lifetime of disappointment.
> it's only a problem if you're not willing to go and strike up conversations with people.
It is not a problem if there are other people willing to also go and strike up conversations with people. That is why GP wrote that it is a systemic problem that can be solved on a personal level.
> Expecting society to come up with "systemic situations" to your personal problems is a fast path to a lifetime of disappointment.
It is not a personal problem. It is a systemic problem. Are you conflating on purpose or do you not understand the difference?
And it is a systemic problem, all you need to do is look at the data.
Hasnt this already been thoroughly discussed? Your ability to do X degrades as you offload it more frequently, eventually to the point that you can no longer even vet the quality of the output.
I think the parent is saying now that that is attempting to be applied to "creativity" directly, as opposed to something like a shift of medium, that it threatens many peoples' ability to maintain creative capabilities.
Anecdotally I've already experienced this at work where post-AI we had a junior completely stagnate and a senior with over a decade of experience in the bay atrophy to the point that he had to be let go.
We're yet to see how this plays out, but a competing business model for creative work is emerging, where it's delegated to chatbots. Naturally, this would result in less creative work for humans.
Playing the devil's advocate a little, you say "can't also do", but that implies prohibition, not hindering. Hindering is not total like that.
It's like trying to have meaningful conversations on Twitter. You don't go to Twitter to do things like that. Can you? Sure. It's just not what the format and the conventions (and the people) lend themselves to.
I don't think there's much merit in pretending that human activities are only shaped by hard limits.
I'm no longer writing code from scratch, as I used to do before. So, very soon, it will be "AI can now do X" makes it so I can't also do X? Same with many creative works. Radio music already sounds so plastic. I lost interest in crafting my text drafts because I can just dump some ugly text and get it refined by AI.
I'm confused. It feels like you are saying you did those things as a means to an end.
Like saying I no longer walk because I can drive. I no longer cook because Doordash exists. I no longer play piano because midi exists.
I mean i guess, but it seems like you didn't LIKE crafting the text or coding from scratch, you just wanted the outcome. If we are talking purely about work, I understand that its about being productive and it sucks to have a job shift to something you enjoy less.
But for daily life? I dont see how it changes, maybe its a tech thing where people think about making their daily lives more productive, but most people dont.
The human-ness is not about outcomes only. It is about doing things, thinking, achieving, socializing, sharing, bonding, feeling happy about what you did, using senses for what they evolved fir, recognizing and responding to body signals and being a biological creature. A lot of these is affected by AI.
You can CHOOSE to let AI think for you or achieve for you, but you dont have to. You only HAVE to in a work context (for some people), which I admit sucks (or is great depending on who you are).
The auto companies said the same - you don't HAVe to drive a car. But then cities were designed for cars, with far-flung work places. Now you HAVE to drive to work. Same with AI. Your world will be woven around AI, giving you no option.
I think we agree that in terms of work, AI changes a lot, and that's a big deal and disrupting to a lot of people's livelihoods.
But when I am with friends, out for a mtn bike ride or playing golf, we are just hanging out like we did 20 years ago. I dont see any cars and I am sure there are tons of AI apps for both sports that would make me "better" but I really don't care. I don't do it for the outcome.
The bonding, happiness, sharing, laughing, are all there just like it always has been and always will be.
In a personal context, you're not hindered from doing those things, so you're correct in that regard. The problem is economic and social. The AI is mediocre enough to drive the value of those things way down; possibly to zero. When something isn't valuable, people are less likely to learn it, and in the future it's less likely that anyone will actually have those skills. For example, we've slopped many illustrators out of jobs and essentially made art (an already awful paying career before AI) economically infeasible. AI illustrations kind of suck though, and even when they're technically competent they're kind of soulless. So you might say, ok, I will hire/contract an artist if I care about the quality of my illustration! Ok, but, if artists are being priced out by a machine then how long before there's no real market for finding a human to do it because all the artists gave up and got a job at starbucks and all you have left are amateurs?
This is almost certainly going to bite us in the ass long term, because eventually without human creativity you're just training AI's on other AI slop, or limiting the possible catalogue of styles to "things that existed before AI ruined every creative job". I guess the question is, what kind of future do you want to live in? One where we have a massive abundance of easy-to-create but vaguely worthless artifacts in a society that's completely devalued being good at something? It just sounds really dystopian to me.
This is repeatedly the argument rolled out by people desperate to get us to accept it at all costs.
Ai doesn’t technically stop me writing code. But it’s sucked so much joy and interest out of it, that I can’t scrape together the motivation to work on side projects anymore. It has a “chilling effect” the effects of which are notoriously indirect to observe.
Exactly, so why make it worse? Why try to automate an industry when the money you make off killing it wouldn't even cover the cost of your research?
> AI doesn't stop creative people from creating. it gives creative people an additional tool with which to create
I can't emphasize enough how much actual creative people hate this shit. Here's a relatively balanced take, although the headline spoils it (How AI Poisons Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeCSzEtZcUw ). Long story short, the struggle is where creative ideas come from. If you automate away the process you automate away the result.
Counter-point: I love that my rubber duck can talk (quack?) back, as well as record and summarize my thoughts on topics I'm working or stuck on.
I've wanted a good voice mode for precisely this reason. When I take my dog on a walk and I'm thinking about a bunch of problems/ideas, I'd love to have feedback and a record, or perhaps to even kick off research or ask questions to fill in gaps that would otherwise have me debating pulling out my phone to try to get an answer.
You want to be a child forever, amazed by your toys or the new things you can do. The toys won't let you grow up and become a normal human. You don't need take a dog for a walk, if you live in a normal place that allows dogs to roam freely. And you don't need to think about a "bunch of problems/ideas". Your mind is a servant of your body. And your body never asked you for that.
>You want to be a child forever, amazed by your toys or the new things you can do.
I don't think having a child-like sense of wonder at the world, or continued human ingenuity, is a sign that one wants to be a child forever.
I'm genuinely sorry if you've lost that spark.
>You don't need take a dog for a walk, if you live in a normal place that allows dogs to roam freely.
I love my dog and love walking him, even though he can freely roam on my property. I also love walking with my wife, and I don't think her agency has much reason for why I might enjoy it?
>Your mind is a servant of your body. And your body never asked you for that.
If you think AI is bad, wait until I tell you about the horrors of social media who profit on controversy and division, US health insurance which profits on rejecting claims, and big pharma profiting on the opioid epidemic.
And it's not like this is new, either. Upton Sinclair was writing about this stuff a century ago with books like The Jungle.
The only difference between then and now is we "think" we're not evil today. We've lied to ourselves that "We're so much better than we were back then." Facebook wanted to bring people together originally, but they ended up providing the most toxic social media experience known to man. Facebook forgot to tell us they cared more about profit than people.
Please spare me the argument AI is the straw to break the camel's back here. The system has been broken a long time before that.
> This is the opposite direction AI should be going. Human relationships are the most valuable thing we have, and so, naturally, technology seeks to intermediate and now replace them.
Valid, but, I think, you conflate two separate things.
AI voice mode as a human socialization/conversation replacement? Cringe in my book, fully in agreement with you. Though my opinion on that aspect remains the same, regardless of whether it is done through text or voice.
AI voice mode as an alternative interface to interact with AI-as-a-tool? Great idea imo. There were a few instances where I was either too tired to type or wanted to brainstorm things in more of a freeform mode, for which a well-working voice mode would have been great.
Naturally, the current distinction between AI-as-a-personality and AI-as-a-tool exists purely on the user's end. All I know is that I want the latter a lot, and if some people want to use it for the former purpose, that's not my problem. Sadly, I think that it will be judged more on how an average person decides to use it (i.e., in the most degenerate/reductionist ways possible), as opposed to being judged on the merits of what it can actually be used for by someone who just treats it as a tool.
Basically 100% of my interaction with AI is some form of question.
But there are people that treat it like a therapist or a friend.
In my opinion, the 2nd group should be discouraged from using these agents in this way, as it cannot be healthy. But if places like Reddit etc. turn into bot towns where do the AI companies get insight into the general population? Through the eyes of their most mentally unstable users?
So I don't really see things changing, and they'll probably get worse.
Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings. Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.
It's also hilariously wrong. It essentially argues, implicitly, that those who don't communicate with other humans are missing out on the "most important thing in life" and cannot form a self-identity.
> Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.
I think you're mistaking their sarcasm for sincerity... especially considering the emphasis on self-identity ironically juxtaposed as originating from a decidedly non-self activity, which has all the hallmarks of being intentional...
On the other hand, reading their other content leads one to believe that they may, in fact, be serious... hmm...
It is unironically correct. Well, interaction with other human beings may not be the only important thing, but it is certainly far and away the most important thing.
Human beings require interaction with other human beings to identify the self. It is impossible to live without others. Read up on solitary confinement sometime - enough time without human companionship will drive any human being (except the schizoaffective) completely insane.
Let's not overdramatize, though. I'm not in need, or even in mood to talk to fellow humans every minute, so time spent with a clanker is not necessary taken from my human relations budget
I also think this undersells the real value of the bot, which is to handle tasks via voice that an average human either would not or could not do.
In the video example with the grannies, the knitter is essentially wanting a PA. Regular folks don't have PAs. Even when that became a thing in the aughts they were all outsourced.
When I've used voice chat, it has often turns into rabbit holes on very niche topics. For example, I had one start about the 1996 performance of Rage Against the Machine in Portland, Oregon that was supposed to feature Wu Tang Clan. (already outside most human's knowledge) that dove into details of the club scene in Los Angeles at the time of RATM's signing to Epic Records.
Was anyone else here at that '96 show in Portland? It seems like it might be challenging to find a person on the internet able to engage on the topic.
The person may exist, but not during my fleeting interest in the subject while walking to the park.
> Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings.
Human beings tend not to be available (results vary by culture).
Also, imagine you're 82 years old and living alone (e.g. widower). It is believed that lack of interaction is a significant driver of cognitive decline (which is why being hard of hearing accelerates the onset of dementia). I wonder if having an LLM to talk to under those circumstances will decelerate cognitive decline?
The extent to which it's true is the extent of the evilness of the technology. Go search the phrase "ai boyfriend" on reddit sometime; imagine what it will be like when society is fully baked with this shit. You're talking to AIs all day at work. You're talking to AI's when you use social media. You're talking to AIs for therapy. You're talking to AIs on dating apps.
If your answer is "well I'll simply touch grass" I agree. But most people won't which is why this is tech is immiserating and, I would argue, evil.
There’s something phenomenally powerful, uncanny, and potentially deeply corrosive about current AI. Dismissing it as “evil” is pat, and prevents any full encounter with something that now irrevocably exists and deserves and demands the consideration of thinking people.
I can't help but think you're conflating cause and effect. People are using a tool (AI) to apply a band-aid to a widespread social problem (loneliness and isolation).
It's possible that an "AI boyfriend" might make someone less prone to put in the continued effort to keep rolling the dice on dating apps, but the reality is that there's a more fundamental problem driving this.
Also, I want this tool for work. Just because society is fubar and people are using this tool as a crutch for their inability to find a partner, doesn't mean I should lose better tooling that makes my life easier.
“Who cares about dirty syringes being left in the street, it’s really important for my work that I have access to the heroin I need”.
Things in society don’t exist in a vacuum, and “who cares about them, so long as I get my needs” is quite literally a part of the problem being discussed.
I'd argue what you're suggesting is more like trying to ban syringes, which have multiple valid uses, in order to stop dirty syringes being left in the street.
As someone with a GLP-1 user at home, responsibly depositing their syringes in an approved container that we dispose of safely at a drop site, I'd rather not have bad users inhibit my access to a tool that makes our lives better.
So do you find the selfish justification of heroin addicts in your example partially compelling, or are you betraying your own rhetorical standards?
Just because things do not exist in a vacuum doesn't mean they should be blurred and conflated until unrecognizability. There's value in explicitly anchoring the salient aspects, and getting the cause and effect right, to the extent these can be done.
Both intelligence amplification and pathological parasocialness are very real effects of this technology, and a blanket ban, a blanket halt, and similar broad and dull policies are absolutely going to be unfair and unreasonable. And even such policies would not "happen in a vacuum", there's a consequence to prohibiting something not prohibited elsewhere.
Whether we can do better is where the jury is still out. I don't think an example like your dirty needles one particularly helps with this. It's asinine and inflammatory, quite the opposite to nuance-inviting, which I believe was more towards your actual intent.
That's not what I meant, nor is "touching grass" necessarily relevant.
I use these tools at work. If I talked to other people instead of a model every time (or even just some of the time) I talk to a model, I'd be tanking everyone's productivity by constantly disrupting them, and would get worse quality responses pretty much guaranteed, if I wouldn't be just ignored outright.
This isn't to say I stopped talking to colleagues either. I reach out to them about the same amount. The time budget I took away from was the one I used to spend manually doing things, reading docs, and so on. So your entire mental model of this is just outright false there.
On a personal level, I traded off entertainment time (though for me, interacting with ChatGPT is also just a form of entertainment). Instead of staring at YouTube, I pitch silly thought experiments, explore topics, ask difficult-to-search-for questions. So once again, I did not trade off social time, meaning what you propose simply does not apply whatsoever. I do not share memes or catch up on life with it, which is what friends are for. It has no sense of actual humor, has no life of its own, and I'm not into roleplay like that. Would be just weird.
There are people who engage pathologically with LLMs, but that is neither the premiere use nor the goal. I'm sure there are also situations where people will actively approach a model over a person, but I do believe people should be able to self-regulate that decision. It gives people leverage to choose the extent and venues of their social engagement. If a topic has a community you do not wish to interact with, you can finally choose not to, while still reaping any prospective benefits (information). This can be a bad thing, but I think it's easy to see that it is also very much good.
For example, there were times where I felt more compelled to interact with ChatGPT than I felt leaving a comment here on HN. And frankly, I'm pretty sure I was way better off, and maybe the people here were too. Or a connected but different example, there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad. Relitigating them with ChatGPT enabled me to get over them in-depth, and even consider different viewpoints properly, without having to be the resident punching bag of some asshole. It's difficult for me to see these as anything but a net improvement.
There is something to be said about interactions in one's life becoming overly structured. I think a reasonable case could be made that in less structured lives, where things just kind of happen, you get more random interactions, and it is through those random interactions that you gain valuable experiences and relationships, even if there's a lot of cruft in addition [0]. That in our effort at optimization, we're making our lives inhuman to live, for the same reason people are crapping on LLMs being statistical (unreliable, imperfect) rather than hardwired (reliable, perfect). But that implies there is an optimal life, which I'm not sure exists: specifically because of this local vs global optimality tension. In complex stateful systems, you're guaranteed to hit scenarios where locally correct and globally correct behaviors are irreconcilable [1], unless you meticulously construct them such that this cannot happen, after all.
I like this reply. I think you and I use AI the same way and probably have a lot in common. But I read things more cynically than you do. Things to ponder:
Read the GPT Live announcement. Why do they want to make it more life-like, if not to encourage the pathological engagement? Why does the model say "thank you for that insightful question"?
It is not "just a tool", that is not the goal. It is designed to be a replacement for people. Even in the most charitable "LLMs are just a tool" reading. The value proposition is to have fewer people (dramatically fewer: the "one person unicorn" with fleets of AI agents!) and for those people to spend more time talking to bots. Replace your junior employees with bots. Replace your customer service people with bots. Replace a bored teenager behind the Wendy's counter with a servile golem whose smooth plastic face can easily be wiped down when spit on.
Their metric is engagement, it is how engaged are you and how long do you spend using the application. They will do absolutely anything to get that number up. Remember, after the GPT-4O debacle, when Altman talked about implementing sex bots? That's a shark, smelling blood. Something like 30% of under 18's have used AI chatbots for "companionship," a big subset of those for ERP.
> Would be just weird.
I was a weird kid who spent 10-12 hours a day on the computer, back when computers were primarily low-res screens and boring text. Now everyone is spending 10-12 hours a day on the computer. These things change in a single generation and I'm sure you know as well as I do that boy does it happen fast.
You sound like me: an older, healthy, well-adjusted person who can understand what's going on when the model says "that's a really insightful question!" Most people are not. They will not understand when it's an AI video clone of Chris Helmsworth.
> there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad
> Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.
How would talking to an AI as if it were not human sound? You can probably set your system prompt to insert “beep boop” between sentences and make it refer to itself as “Cybertron9000 Personal Computing Device” if that’s what you like. Is that an improvement? Or are you against voice computer interfaces altogether?
I don't know the answer. But a robotic voice is probably not a bad idea — just having a reminder that the thing you're talking to is not actually anything like you. If you want to go full send, you could have the LLM generate a clickable interface on demand so you could interact with it as a machine. Voice/computer interfaces are obviously useful, especially for disabled folks. But the ones that existed in the past didn't pretend to laugh at your non jokes or imitate vocal fry.
I think you could make it impersonal sounding. Like, right now ChatGPT throws in a lot of cheeky things. They don't really bother me because I don't anthropomorphize it, but, a lot of otherwise smart people are struggling with anthropomorphizing these things right now (Richard Dawkins..) so it strikes me that the less personality they have the better. (If you want personality just throw it into the prompt, ya know?) To their credit I think this is customizable in ChatGPT right now (it's been a while since I looked), but "impersonal" should probably be the default until society adjusts to these things.
I would also like to tone those down, and prefer if they just focused on creating a nice, clear, natural-sounding voice. I don’t think the “emotional roleplaying” adds anything to what I perceive as a computer interaction. But that’s precisely the opposite of the problem the other commenters seem to be voicing; I have no problem recognizing what I’m interacting with, and I don’t worry about being manipulated - not by the tone of its voice, and even if it had a video avatar, all that. Do you guys seriously have this problem of being confused by LLMs that sound too much like humans, or is this a theoretical problem that you’re worried somebody else is having?
I am open to the possibility that this is a future that is coming, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re years away from that tech. Is it actually here for you?
Maybe it's just that conversing with something or someone that is acting manipulative can be unpleasant in and of itself, even if the manipulation is not successful.
Each time I hear the bot emote, it's like a subtle suggestion to just play along and anthropomorphize it - it feels weird, silly and annoying
Isn’t voice I difference in degree rather than in kind? I definitely talk to AI as if it were human (one might say the UX of AI is to emulate a human). And a large portion of my interaction with humans is via text, for example, this post!
> Isn’t voice I difference in degree rather than in kind?
There is a difference in expression / emotionality with speaking vs writing. Speaking tends to carry more emotion while writing is generally more deliberate/less-emotional*. Having a voice conversation will be more likely to get a human to engage in an emotional based expression mode, which could increase the chance of "false connections", believing the AI "gets" them or "understands" or "listens". This happens with text too, as some headlines show.
The issue is that while some people are going to "connect" with their AI in text and voice, some who do not make the connection via text may do so via voice because it tends to change a persons expression mode.
> I definitely talk to AI as if it were human
Do you talk to it as if it were a friend or family? or Do you just use natural language to give directives? The distinction, I believe, is in the kind of way we express the "talking".
I talk to AI as if it were a tool that understands human commands and then executes those commands and relays them in a human understandable format. This includes commands to provide options that I may not have covered and explain the options. If I talked to a human this way, they wouldn't be around much longer -- unless they were an employee and even then they would probably be looking for a new job
After reading some of the psychotic break headlines from AI chats, I see some people really do talk to AI as if it were human. Which I would guess includes seeking broad "thoughts and feelings" on a persons situation or asking the AI if their view/side of things is the "right or wrong" side. Basically begging the AI to be responsible for their own thoughts, or simply offloading them and taking what comes back -- which is going to be what they wanted to hear because the entire context would be full of emotion based prompts.
Right, I think the challenge is that LLMs are essentially language-based, which is itself a very convenient interface. Covering the maximally humanistic default interface with something more mechanical is like tying your own shoelaces together, but it would protect us from the psychological hijacking we're so prone to when interacting with these machines.
I disagree. Fluid natural conversational AI is far more productive than any other interface for working with LLMs. Although I suppose you could make the argument that it should be more... Robotic like. Like in StarTrek. Which, is honestly probably better for work, too. A "get shit done" mode, of pure, cold, efficiency.
In one of the videos the AI quips back things like "Happens to the best of us" - its basically pretending to be human and that feels kind of creepy and weird, like it's trying to cultivate a para-social emotional bond.
I just want voice assistants to reliably understand what I say and do what I mean
So hopefully you can turn that off.
There are plenty of applications for that more human conversational style though (from mock interviews, improv practice, learning languages, etc) - I just don't want that for most things.
- nobody else with the skills
- talk to machine
- nobody develops the skills to have a conversation
- go to step 1.
- bonus step: your own skills atrophy too.
Devil's advocate: The widespread lack of social skills was not caused by LLMs in the first place. In fact, AI ChatBots, if used right, can actually help remedy lacking socialising skills.
Not if there’s good money to be made exploiting people for money instead!
There’s plenty of evidence that these models worsen these issues, and we know from prior experience that companies like FB will happily exploit vulnerable users for money.
I see it more as a way technology could be abused rather than an inherent flaw in the technology itself. If you start to replace human interaction with chatbot interaction, that's bad, but there's nothing wrong with using a human-like chatbot in moderation. So many other types of technology are fine in moderation but can be abused in a human-interaction-replacing way: television, social media, video games, etc.
The thing is, individual moderation isn't sufficient to combat collective capture. This is Ivan Illich's idea of "radical monopoly", where a technology (like cars or the internet) becomes so entrenched that individuals can't realistically opt out any longer. This happens when we abdicate our collective responsibility to the internal logic and incentives of the tech.
SOME human relationships are the most valuable thing we have. Many (if not most) human relationships in many cultures are just trespassing everyone's boundary via peer pressure.
Where do you draw the line on how good human-machine interfaces should be? I'm sure this model could be a convenience for many, and while it may be social for some, I am not sure it would substitute existing human interaction for those users.
Besides, I do not think there is anything inherently immoral with not being social, or not having the ability to be. Consider for example people who do not naturally have the social network to interact with people they want to (e.g. some gifted children).
I am not convinced this model has enough empathy to satisfy most users on an emotional level. A bond is not merely an exchange of words, but prolonged and deep contemplation of the other being. We cannot introspect into these machines, and they certainly cannot yet do the same to us.
> This is the opposite direction AI should be going.
There is no moral obligation, in any domain, to refuse to make a product that adults, with full informed consent, find useful and purchase. Who are you to say you know better than the market?
Market conditions are not a moral standard either, nor do they represent any cohesive one in particular. Not sure why you're contrasting their opinion with this, it's literally no better.
Markets only work in well-regulated environments, this has been known since forever (Adam Smith).
There is no meaningful competition in a marathon if I can drive you over with a car at the first 100m.
And thanks fkin God that we have regulations and meaningful laws and some asshole for-profit company can't just put drugs into food.. the "informed buyer" is bullshit. Humans are faulty, and there is a billion dollar industry meant to take advantage of said faults: it's called marketing.
This is a cute argument to make, which patently doesn’t work in the face of decades of evidence on the pernicious effects of social media _alone_, let alone the “turbo infantilising sycophancy machine”.
Pretending that everything’s totally fine and ok because “it’s adults” really just disregards reality.
I don't think most adults can get much social value or satisfaction from an AI conversation they know is not a real person. Those who can get that satisfaction likely have so few human-to-human interactions that an AI companion may be as good a solution to chronic loneliness as any.
I'd be more worried about the inevitable robo-nannies who could end up talking more to young children than actual people.
> This is the opposite direction AI should be going
I don't understand the counterfactual. What's the opposite direction of this direction that's desirable? Less capable voice models are obviously not it, so I am curious what direction you mean or if it's just vague indirection.
Regardless how natural AI becomes I’ve yet to replace any human relationships. Where do you see the aim of technology as trying to replace people? You might be using it wrong.
I want to bring some attention to a spectacular sleight of hand that occurs at minute 4 of this podcast:
"The way that I formulate the argument, just to get us started here, is that acts, the things we do, have ends. We act for an end. They have a purpose.
And that it is wrong to deliberately frustrate an act from attaining its end, from attaining its purpose."
I will draw your attention to the three instances of "end", first we have the noble, tautological, "have ends", actions have ends; then, following close behind we see "an end", we act for an end, those ends have been made into one now, singular end; and finally, "its end", the act, as an entity unto itself, has an end you mustn't interrupt.
Aren't they already very cognizant of handwringing like yours? Their article mentions various safeguards and actively steering the model away from being emotional companions and so on. It's a far cry from the OpenAI two years ago or whenever it was when they were entertaining the idea of allowing/enabling adult conversations with their models.
I personally think this is a moralistic regulatory overreach. And they definitely do that due to political pressure too, since there are various bills around the world in various legislatures that want to regulate AIs giving useful advice and being too personal to talk to.
So you can rest assured, I think, at least in that regard. The AI disempowerment will come to us anyway, just in a more sanitized corporate form.
What I’m missing from this announcement is the capability to use connectors and tools. I don’t really get it - NONE of the frontier assistants can use tools / connectors while in voice mode - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. It seems so obvious: I want to be able to research stuff, pull up documents, jot down notes and do productive work while I’m talking to it, and not end voice mode whenever I need to connect to an app or service.
It’s weird. The old Claude voice mode WAS able to use tools but when they revamped it, it lost that capability and is now pinned to Haiku :(
So, yay for finally a voice mode that’s powered by a frontier model and hopefully as good as Grok voice, but sad to still not see tool use while in voice mode.
(I haven’t tried it yet, only read the announcement)
One of the videos on the announcement page shows someone making coffee and it _appears_ that the agent counts 30 seconds in real-time. Curious to know how they made it do that without tool support.
A timer tool with a callback feature would take like a couple of hours to implement, a model which has a native internal ability to know the time would take ages to make
I don't think it needs an 'internal clock'. It needs two things. (1) the timer tool, (2) to know not to lie about having a tool or using a tool. I think (2) is the hard thing.
> I don’t really get it - NONE of the frontier assistants can use tools / connectors while in voice mode - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok.
Is that true? I have a friend who often brainstorms with Gemini (I think just on an Android phone), and he has it actually do stuff related to the conversation (including adding content to notes).
In any case, you can always vibe code one with pi!
Using gpt-realtime-2 you can achieve very similar results with low latency streaming which gives you this feeling of an assistant that is there in the room with you. I made a tweak to so you can try out the gpt-realtime-2 model with tooling that gives you this: https://sippet.ai/?enabler=hn
Kept trying to use the demo, but despite giving it microphone permissions and seeing that the microphone was in use, couldn't get the demo to 'hear' me at all.
I’ve been using gpt-realtime-1 for my personal assistant that runs my company and plans my day. And it works pretty well, even makes tool calls and all that.
But the multi modal stuff has resulted in a lot of debugging with weird events and message and audio sequences having race conditions, but overall it is pretty awesome.
Looking forward to moving to this model later today and will chime back in with results.
I could see it relating to tools having unpredictable latency but if they already do background hand off to 5.5 then it seems like they could just enable it within that context.
A big part of this announcement does seem to be _delegation_ in the background; they give the example of web search but that could be any tool. I haven't tried it yet either but sounds like they've found a reasonable UX that mixes that sort of high-and-variable latency tool calling (potentially with agentic loops) with a continuously speaking live voice.
Funny enough I have only encountered two voice modes that were okay to use tools and they are so far out there that you wouldn't even think to try. Bixby and Perplexity (in android phone digital assistant mode) both seem happy to use whatever the account is connected to. I mainly use it for managing my local phone's calendar. Claude chat can interact with it but voice can't which is frustrating.
This is something I built for myself, and to experiment with inference stacks. You can obviously just transcribe audio and hand it off to frontier models, so all you really need is a good voice stack and a “driver” for the interaction (like a phone call, place to see their work).
There are two big problems with this space IMO. One isn’t that you can’t get this to work but that people generally aren’t willing to pay for it for themselves, rather as a way to screen or automate stuff to be used by other people. Did you know Claude Code has a voice mode and that openai launched whisper a year ago, both of which have positive sentiment and adoption in heavy ai tool users? Yet it’s a blip in their marketing or why people use their products, meanwhile outside of coding, most of the biggest and highest earning AI product companies so far are voice agents targeting customer service, sales, business processes, etc.
The second is related: voice is genuinely a low-bandwidth medium, so as a primary interface for interacting with AI there is not a lot you can get out of it compared to eg complex technical work or visualizations or interactive applications. It is physically and mentally demanding to speak-aloud a highly detailed prompt fast enough that VAD won’t cut you off and you have something with comparable information density or specificity vs text. But to keep up a shorter and more natural cadence you’ll not be able to wait on a lot of thinking/tool unless you play UI tricks (ums and fillers, two models in a trench coat), break the illusion of a single coherent conversation, or take a lot of long pauses.
That’s why for the supplementary coding use case it’s mostly used for remote steering, and for general use marketed towards the large and very not-online group of people for whom typing is not a natural or common thing for them to spend their time on. Now that so much spend goes through heavily used token subscriptions and they’ve proven that kind of product, they’re not marketing “tool to get the most tokens per $ running your subscription 24/7” anymore lol.
What I’m most interested in is true “ambient” tool use against my own data or work, and for-later (or pushed live via your phone) visualizations or “five models in a trench coat but still coherent” UX, which you probably are too. But I think unless you work a lot with AI tools already it’s hard to understand how that’s any different from asking Alexa to set a timer, and either way something you’re not so desperate to have that you go looking for it, or pay smaller vendors/set up yourself.
Exactly. I told the assistant to create world cup google calendar entries and it said it can't connect to my calendar, whereas I can have it do that with no issues on the normal gpt client.
Because they take too long to run, and have an unpredictable latency and success rate. Seeing loading spinners and error messages in a visual interface is fine, but it would firmly put a natural language conversation in uncanny valley territory.
Regular chat already supports voice input, so might as well use that.
Huh? You can expose tool functions to Gemini's live API, and it will call them as part of thinking about responses. I've used this to expose e.g. current GPS location for a smartwatch voice assistant.
Like a lot of AI things, this seems both cool and kind of creeps me out. I've never used voice interfaces in the past (siri, the google one, whatever is on my tv) so I'm probably not the target market, but this does seem like an improvement.
The part that creeps me out is, we're living in an era where we're more disconnected from each other than ever before. Do we really need to be replacing conversations?! The demonstration video of old ladies sort of hints at something for me, which I think we already have a societal problem with the way we treat the elderly (and a massive elderly-loneliness issue) and there's kind of a sadness of imagining people becoming really close with this machine that doesn't really think. Definite ick factor.
None of the things I'm talking to ChatGPT about are replacing human conversations. It's replacing having to type a question into Google on my phone.
But you do bring up a good point with old people with no one to talk to. This technology would be a god send for them. And if you think otherwise I hope your next words are that you routinely visit nursing homes and talk with old people.
I see it a little differently here. If someone is offering a digital companion to someone who is lonely, that seems to be slightly preferable to having no connection at all.
My most common use case for voice mode is: Kid. Talking to and asking about stuff that we see outside becomes something to do together.
> I think we already have a societal problem with the way we treat the elderly
The actual problem is that we keep up the wishful thinking regarding our collective capacity and interest to entertain physically and mentally frail people. Before old people stop deteriorating in ways that make them unfun to interact with (I have high hopes we will be getting there in the next 20 years or so) this is not going to happen. Just like we are not going to save the environment by telling people to pay more for less and have less.
It's not a societal solution and I am increasingly irritated by people who pretend otherwise. It is causing so much harm under the appealing guise of humanity. It's quite the opposite and just people unwilling to deal with reality in a constructive way.
Do you think every society treats their elderly this way (not just now, historically)?
I'm just going to go out on a limb and say if you think people deserve bad treatment because they stopped being "fun" you should probably look into your moral compass.
I feel similarly. But texting became the primary form of inter-personal communication in the last couple of decades, in part because that was the primary modality technology could handle.
So, now that we can talk to computers, maybe we will feel more comfortable talking to people too? Wishful I know, but one can hope right?
Once this gets video capabilities and is ported to glasses, it'll be a major revolution for blind people (and I say this as a blind person).
People have tried "smart <thing> that helps blind people navigate" since the 80s, many, many, many times, and all such projects failed. The cycle of "wow, blind people could benefit from a navigation aid, why don't I make one, if there's none around, I must surely have been the first bright university student to think of this idea" is pretty well known in the community, and I'm personally quite tired of it. Nevertheless, I think this may be the one.
Circa 2020, I have said that people who are getting a guide dog now are probably getting their last one. I think we aren't far off from that prediction coming true.
GPT-Live-1 is the first version of a new generation of models, and we believe the full-duplex architecture + delegation enables entirely new ways of human-AI interaction.
Hey! Bit of an unusual question maybe: if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think? If you hear about teenagers only spending time with your chatbot in 5 years, will you feel some amount of personal responsibility or not? Always curious to hear you guys' perspective on that kind of stuff!
That's not really a fair question, especially given the audience here on HN. Most here have blood on their hands from the previous 25 years of tech-eats-the-world.
Well this is a new brand of whataboutism I haven’t seen before!
Did something bad? Better ablate yourself of the responsibility of holding people to account for making it _worse_! Acting this way just makes it seem more like you regret the blood on your hands because it has dirtied your shirt, and not because you’ve done something actually bad, otherwise you’d have at least some degree of guilt and reticence to see things get worse.
> if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think?
Looking at the 30,000-foot view of how society is set up: laws, economic system, employee incentives, etc, do you suppose it matters what the individual contributors think? I say this not to absolve anyone of responsibility, but to point out the obvious outcomes of our incentives across the strata (polity -> shareholders -> boards -> C-suite -> employees)
I will bet you dollars to donuts, somewhere inside OpenAI is a frequently-used revenue dashboard, but not for loneliness - if anything, OpenAI will make horny models and tout itself as a solution to loneliness, a la character.ai - if that earns them more money.
Technology is what you make of it. If you want to make it your best friend and your only friend, that's your choice. But I would guess more people would use it as a personal tutor. If it works as well as the demo, this already crushes most language learning apps. Actually the only apps for learning language that it would fail to replace would still be Tandem and HelloTalk because it still can't replicate the nuance of real human interaction.
"Blame the individual" doesn't really make sense when we're talking about things that have a society-wide impact. As an analogue, personally I'm not on social media, but I am affected by social media because everyone around me is on social media and their happiness and wellbeing also impacts me. AI companies need to stop pretending they can just outsource responsibility for their products.
I think assuming people will use it as a tutor/learning tool is.. way too optimistic. A small fraction will, but the majority will just view things like a second language as something not worth learning.
Go read "Careless People". The social media people knew exactly how damaging their product was early on, as evidenced by the fact that they wouldn't even let their own children use it. I think AI people understand how damaging their product is too; and so I will never respect them unless they take responsibility for the things they create. Going "not my problem bruh, I got my bag!" is a bad ethical position.
Was this directed at the voice technology in the article, or at AI in general - as they are two very different conversations?
If you're talking about ChatGPT in general (as I guess you are) I think the Jury's still out on whether this will have a net positive or negative on society.
Right now, it's leaning towards negative, but there are optimistic futures to be had at the same time.
As someone who likes to think that they would turn down a lot of tech jobs due to moral dilemmas - for me, currently working on AI wouldn't be one.
For me at-least it's a tool to learn quicker, and reduce friction on projects I otherwise may not have dived into. As with all new technology, we're still in this grace period / lack the bigger picture we now have on other, now known to be destructive technologies.
I would say no if the question was asked of me. It’s like asking if you’d feel bad about marriage if you ended up divorced with a child. Or if you’d feel bad about commenting if it made someone feel like they lost brain cells.
The morality of an action isn’t based on actual consequences because the future isn’t known in advanced. All we can do is act on the perceived consequences of our actions, and if we think those are good, pursue them.
You don't go into a marriage assuming you'll get divorced. You assume you won't, hope for the best, work not to, and then it happens. You work through those problems with the child so that it hopefully doesn't impact them as much as it otherwise could.
The loneliness epidemic is driven by companies maximizing keeping their customers engaged with their screens, something OpenAI is wont to do. Knowing that the company wants customers engaged and that this will do that, and also knowing that that plays into the loneliness epidemic by substituting human interaction, makes it far different than getting married and then maybe or maybe not getting divorced.
People who do this kind of stuff are very irritating. You clearly have some problem with the work they do. Instead of saying and approaching that outright, you pass it in some passive aggressive fake bullshit. Makes you sound like the kind of person I would much rather not be speaking to, which is kind of ironic given your comment.
Oh no, now I'd better blame Hitler and Stalin's ancestors for their misdeeds. Of course, the SS soldier bears no responsibility, however, as he was just doing his job.
Its weird how years of relentless doom trolling and threatening peoples livelihoods, mixed with absolutely real, measurable, AWFUL societal impacts have soured people!
> GPT-Live-1 is the first version of a new generation of models, and we believe the full-duplex architecture + delegation enables entirely new ways of human-AI interaction.
Intuitively, decoupling semantic and audio-timeslice-space generations with coupled but distinct histories is right model architecture, not just for these sorts of assistants, but for domains like robotics too.
Can I connect it to my skills/tools? Example case, I have a knowledge base and event log in my company. I need a brainstorm companion, which will have full access to this knowledge, can converse about it and can invoke skills/tools available in the repo.
In ChatGPT, Voice doesn't yet support connectors, but we're hoping to add support soon! Once GPT-Live launches in the API, you can also build custom integrations yourself.
+1 to the op. This is one of the first things I thought about after using it for a few minutes. I have a large collection of local knowledge bases that I use through codex, having this real time thing be able to plug into it would be the killer feature, otherwise the utility is severely limited. I don't want to talk to it about the weather, I want to brainstorm about the things I am working on, which it currently knows nothing about.
One big gap I've run into for UX is most realtime voice harnesses wait for a full response from tools, and at most support the model filling the dead air until then
It'd be a game-changer to be able to have the model start replying with partial information streamed from the tool call, then seamlessly continue with additional information.
ok sorry - can you explain more why it'd be a game changer to stream the tool call. Whats an example tool call that this would help with. Most of the time the tools I want called are at the end of the conversation (i.e. "summarize what we talked about and email it to me"). Or if its in the middle of the conversation, we can just carry on the conversation while the tool call is happenning in parallel..
"It'd be a game-changer to be able to have the model start replying with partial information streamed from the tool call, then seamlessly continue with additional information."
You can't continue a conversation if it hinges on information that takes inherently takes 30+ seconds to generate. Previously even models that "handle it" can only play for time.
You can try and simulate this by messing with model context mid-conversation but that breaks down reliability massively as the model loses track of what it's talking about.
Super nice to be able to finally have voice mode search stuff in the background. The more conservational vibe is also a nice touch. The real game-changer we're all waiting on, though, is being able to vibecode/deeply interact with an OS through voice mode. Until then voice mode will continue to be a niche, interesting product. Once that's implemented, though, it will be one of the most important technologies available. There's a lot of people I know that don't use a lot of the frontier capabilities of AI right now because of the required typing interface. Once that's changed and you can interact with these capabilities through voice mode (and ideally on your phone) I definitely see them and lots of people like them becoming big users of AI.
If it's not able to connect to my other apps like gcal, it should suggest that I use the standard gpt client, instead of telling me 'I don't have the capability to do that' which is misleading as some might presume the normal client doesn't have that capability either.
I like it! I was watching a YouTube video of someone driving in a big city. I saw an interesting skyscraper and asked Chatgpt what it was. After Chatgpt answered, I asked for a photo of the building to confirm, and Chatgpt helpfully showed it in-chat. It was the correct building!
And because the voice is so frictionless to talk to, I asked about what company owns the building, then that company's industry, then how that industry works in this particular country etc. I probably wouldn't have bothered going down a rabbit hole like this if I'd had to type. Voice is much easier than typing.
I'm currently on the 20 $/mo subscription and using codex meaningfully, and i'm loving this.
I am considering bumping my subscription to the 100 $/month and this might be the reason i switch, BUT: i really envision me using this also through other means as well (eg: agents like openclaw/hermes) in agentic ways.
Will this be supported?
I can make OpenAI stuff the center of my agentic AI life, but I need it to be interoperable.
We're adding support to the API soon, which will let you integrate with any agent in the background. Would love to see the community go wild with it. You can sign up to be notified here: https://openai.com/form/gpt-live-1-in-the-api/
Much better than it was before but it’s still significantly weaker than a direct chat.
For example I asked
“Why should LLM attention use dot product instead of cosine similarity, being that we often hear vector magnitude does not encode most of the useful information needed”?
The voice response was directionally right but lacked detail and was a little hand wavy.
The answer to the same question in a text chat was much higher quality.
The voice response replied “let me think about that…” so it appears to be invoking 5.5 as advertised, but it’s definitely weaker.
A lot of this is steerable! Our current personality is optimized for brainstorming and conversations, but you can provide custom instructions to ask it to go deep and give you info-dense or more technical answers.
I found myself probing more and more questions to have it do that, I wish it could remember to provide details answers, I thought the replies were way too short and hand-wavy like one of the prior comments suggested.
You can read far more text than listening. If the voice response is too long, people lose the patience quickly. So it is better to show it on screen if we have too much text.
I think the bare truth is that the target audience for this product is not people who are highly particular about terminology in answers involving vector mathematics.
It’s a different set of tradeoffs for users that don’t already have strong engagement or interest in existing AI products.
Do you realize how many more people prefer to chat over the phone and watch television or videos in their free time vs type multiple paragraphs of text into a chat window and then read 3x more back?
I’m not even talking about grandma here, it’s a non starter for the vast majority of humans who don’t spend their free time writing and reading tech news. To most people, having to write out a bunch of words describing their problem/goals, then sift through pages and pages of detailed response to get an answer, feels overwhelming and not worth doing.
I would naturally assume they cut the background thinking level to the minimum. It's a halting problem question and with in text 5.5 with max thinking will chew on a question for 5-10 minutes sometimes. That would make a pretty awkward conversation.
Gemini live has been able to do this for over a year now. I can just activate it on my phone and it really works surprisingly well, especially the interruption. I've tested it with my 95 year old Dutch grandmother and it switched seamlessly between English and Dutch with her and handled her poor hearing very well, including her asking for repetition.
I'm a little surprised by how much OAI is playing catch up here.
Gemini live is also pretty decent at computer vision stuff too. I've used it while working on my bike & car a few times, with my phone camera and it'll circle/highlight specific screws and parts. You can set your phone up on a tripod and it'll walk you through complete repairs for things.
I used it for double checking some stuff while helping my friend build his PC! I had it in tight spaces and it helped me verify some details around which nvme slot to use first.
One thing Simon pointed out: Usually live voice models are not as capable as the frontier ones. What makes this one special is that it can delegate the task to a frontier model while talking to you.
Exactly! I've been using Gemini Live for a while now and have been able to converse quite fluently. Maybe it's the long think functionality that's a differentiator here from OAI, which I'd be surprised if Gemini doesn't come out with of their own this year.
The ad with the grandmas is cute and funny, but from the first 20 seconds you can see that the voice annoyingly interrupts people while they are talking. It's almost as if it tries to reply too fast - faster than a real person would, and the results is that it replies while you're still talking.
Oh and there was also a small fail in the live translate demo: the grandma says "tell him that..." which the bot translates verbatim, whereas a real translator would of course understand that this is an aside not to be translated.
Well I guess at least I should be happy that they're transparent in their ads :)
It's normal to start a sentence after the other person in the conversation pauses, especially if you're eager to say something (like the chat agent is), but a real human is socially aware and would in most cases immediately cease talking if the other person starts another sentence at the same time. Humans do this so much in their conversations that the other person doesn't really register the interruption at all.
Exactly. If they have a setting somewhere for the minimum duration of a pause in the user's speech before starting replying, they should just crank it up.
In this other add [1], it's even worse, the user has to say "There's more to the story though" and almost looks annoyed + the agent overreacts to _that_ with a weird "Aaaaahh!".
Oh well... I'm sure they'll get it right eventually.
Are there any open source full duplex models that are out besides PersonaPlex? There was a chinese open one, maybe Fun Audio chat or something, that said it was going to release a full duplex version but I am not sure if it did.
My dream would be open source full duplex with function calling or some kind of rudimentary text output. PersonaPlex is still interesting although it was looking like we would need to fine tune it to handle outgoing or avoid going off the rails easily.
I want to know this too, as I’m hoping to fabricobble up a “smart speaker” that communicates with my local AI assistant. Right now we do everything via iMessage but it would be nice to be able to tell it to add things to my grocery list by voice while my hands are busy in the kitchen. Also would love if anyone has any advice on what microphone & speaker to pick out, was planning on just reusing a raspberry pi I’ve got around for the brain part.
if you don't find that then you could fake it with personaplex possibly but making another ASR/STT model just listen continuously and transcribe then send to an LLM with function calling. at least that would allow one direction easily.
Working on this at https://duplexio.ai which will be open weights and free for non-commercial use. If you want to work on this send an email to anders@duplexio.ai
I'm so mad that this might make me re-subscribe to ChatGPT. I wouldn't have believed how much I use the voice feature before LLMs and ChatGPT currently has the best voice interface. I think Grok's interface is the next best, then Claude.
Absolutely the same. Now that Fable is back, the Claude voice interface is... worth dealing with. The app mostly seems to have trouble recovering from networking issues which is jarring in a deep conversation.
But I don't think Fable or even Opus are ever used as the backend in voice mode. It has to respond in real time so I think in voice mode it's always using Sonnet.
same, i use the voice feature every day at the gym, talk to it for 1 hour, and then make anki cards based on what it has taught me, total game changer.
If it is to be believed—which I wouldn't count on—it sounds like the intention of the prompt was to keep the model focused, but the model's interpretation of it was to keep you focused.
I am surprised that Siri has only been mentioned 5 times here, out of the current 355 comments.
I am wondering if this because Siri is so bad, people think of Siri now as a voice activation method rather than an AI assistant as it was intended.
The demo is so good, what was once a sci-fi / Iron Man Jarvis services is now real. I don't follow AI closely, but all previous iteration were at best ask and answer type of services. It wasn't real conversation. And whatever flaws it may have now, at the rate of improvement within a few iteration it will surely reach good enough stage for majority of people.
This is also scary. Not just for adults, but for kids. How they could become even more isolated.
I remember the PC era, the internet from Information Super Highway to Web 2.0 Then Smartphone. It may have been obvious to many but AI really is something much bigger than all the previous three, perhaps combined. And it is also the only one that I think is scary.
Siri is how I set timers, alarms and reminders on my iPhone. Every once in a while, I'll try to use it to play something on Spotify via my Sonos, then give up and do it manually in the app instead.
Does this model do better ignoring side conversations? That's the biggest hindrance to using ChatGPT's carplay feature is someone will say something, stopping ChatGPT from speaking or taking it in a different direction.
yes, it now has much better ability to understand the conversation and decide whether it should respond (and you can also tell it when it should respond)
It was obvious from the live demo that this thing still hasn't learned when to shut up. When it stops tacking on "I'm here when you need me" to every response that could have just been "ok" or simply silence, maybe they'll have something. I think voice remains OpenAI's most disappointing product.
You have always been able to pick between voices of many kinds though? Do you find them all sultry? From the British woman to the 17th century pirate soundalike?
If there was a voice that stripped away all the affectation I would be more likely to use it. It pretending to be human is extremely off-putting for me.
For the first actor - why does her accent change the longer she talks. It's like they had an "Estelle Costanza" dial that they started at zero and slowly rolled up to 8 or 9.
This solves my biggest annoyance with the current advanced voice: its speech getting interrupted by me setting yup or even background noise if loud enough
I've had some funny interactions with this issue. I sometimes use the voice mode when walking my dogs. I can confirm that ChatGPT responds positively to being told it's a "Good girl!"
Hoping to use this for natural conversation language learning. Previous iterations of the app kept correcting my words/grammar before it got to the model, causing issues with identifying mistakes in speech
I was going to post a comment on a related topic (I couldn't find in the announcement if this is English only or not), but would you mind expanding? I was thinking about doing something very similar, and yeah, if the model isn't hearing the mistakes I'm making, that would dramatically decrease it's usefulness.
I tried it for these purposes and it didn't seem any better. I couldn't even tell it was a new model. I tested today, I'm an EU customer so maybe the rollout is delayed
There doesn’t seem to be any indication whether this is available in the chat-got app nor is there any indication in the app that anything has changed. Anyone know how to actually try this?
We're beginning the rollout now, and will roll out in the next few days to ChatGPT users globally. Make sure to update to the latest version of the app!
In the voice settings, there were 2 options - Standard and Advanced, as well as a help link saying they were in the process of rolling out the newest model -- I think the new model is named Live (and is not Standard or Advanced). The help link explained it all.
So at least for me in the app there did seem to be a way to check.
GPT‑Live is rolling out now to ChatGPT users globally across iOS, Android, and ChatGPT.com. GPT‑Live‑1 will become the default model powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT‑Live‑1 mini will become the default for Free users.
The demo video shows quite how rough around the edges this is....
Doesn't quite stop fast enough when you interrupt it. Can't find info quick enough so you have to change topic and then have it give you results later, etc.
This is a move in the right direction, but there is lots of engineering still to be done!
You're right, and to me it's refreshing to see a promo video that shows how the real product works, rather than a sanitized over-produced edit that takes out all the flaws.
I'm currently watching Better Call Saul for the first time with my wife. The fact that they used old ladies for the Ad, and that it is evident they are reading from a prompt (fake-ish feeling) gives me strong James McGill vibes haha. Hopefully the actresses were paid handsomely.
As someone with a chronic eye disease that makes screens difficult, I love this voice feature. It gives me hope that, even if my disease progresses, I’ll be able to rely less on screens and screen readers for many everyday tasks in the future.
I don't think the voice feature should act like a human, but 'complement' it. I already have friends I can talk to. Perhaps for quick answers it might be helpful but Google already does that for me and I don't have to worry about having to 'archive' the chat later and creates clutter.
I really hope at some point we can 'option click' or whatever, and choose multiple threads to archive. It takes FOREVER to archive the cluttery chats one by one. That's my one wish feature, please make batch cleanup of my client reasonably easy. Imagine having to delete one file at a time in a folder of 50 plus files. Barf.
This looks very cool. An AI that can listen and speak and handle tasks without breaking the flow of conversation would solve some big annoyances with current tools.
The concern is though as these get better will people struggle to distinguish these with real human connections?
people have been mistaking AI conversations with reality since the very first text-based models came into the public view with ChatGPT. i'm sure with each incremental improvement to outputs like this, though, more people will get convinced of its "humanity"
Every time things like this come up, I can't help but think of the ending of Inception.
It's less that you're convinced it's real and more that you no longer care if it is. "Feels real enough" is good enough.
I'm a technical user first, so I'm not sure if models have improved for RP the way they improved for applied STEM tasks and technical brainstorming. But if there is an improvement curve there, I wouldn't be surprised if this only grows in popularity.
Oh, god. They are marketing it as an old people artificial friend. Probably will blame users in the future when they get attached and have ai-induced psychosis.
I worry what this will do to human communication if it becomes commonplace. Will everyone learn to be a forceful speaker, speaking over anyone they want to stop speaking?
I have not used voice mode much with chatgpt. I was surprised to learn that they were already not running the voice model like a UX orchestrator while utilizing other models in background for actual research/response etc. I guess it's good they launched what they could and got here in steps. I suspect in the near future my personal device (mobile/laptop) will be powerful enough to run any UX orchestrator model locally – and route to multiple frontier closed/open model providers in the background as appropriate. The battle is going to be platform owners (Apple/Google/Microsoft) wanting to lock-down the access to that local hardware and local interaction paradigms (ambient always-on full-duplex voice) and intermediate through their platform layers - rationalizing it as consumer security/privacy protection (which is right for most people, but sucks for the open market). Meanwhile I suspect OpenAI/Meta et al will try to build their own hardware and become platform owners themselves, though unsuccessfully. And it's going to take some company like epic games to get them to open that up. and that's probably what the next decade is going to be all about.
While this is likely very useful to an enormous number of people, I suspect it will be even more useful for the elderly (if somehow it can be made accessible to them).
IIUC the literature, there is serious loss of functionality associated with lack of verbal interaction. People can say "they should just talk to more people" or "more people should make time for them" but the fact of the matter is that it doesn't happen, and if this helps terrific.
Oh wow, I'd like this. Our current voice interactions with ChatGPT are on a 4o era model; really terrible. oAI has always been pretty cagey on the architecture of their end to end multimodal models. And RL has basically made them worse since launch. (Check the launch videos where the model sings, is more realtime, has accents, etc). I'd love to try a next gen version.
A year ago I tried using the voice mode to be the worlds most over engineered golf score card: I basically said “ok I’m golfing with some friends, mind if I tell you the scores as we get them and you tell us the running totals?”
It was awful, it kept overhearing us talking and thought we were talking to it, interjecting with nonsense because it couldn’t really understand what we were talking about. And when I would say “ok render a score card” it couldn’t drop to the text interface or anything, it had to stay as voice, so it fumbled around trying to read the scores back to us.
It’s a very stupid use case but I viewed it as a stress test to see how well the voice mode and multi-modality could work. It failed miserably, but I’ll be interested to see if this new version does any better (not that I actually need this use case, writing on a card with a pencil is just fine.)
Whether that's due to my slight autism or massive nerdery, I don't want more realistic voice. I already switched to non-advanced voice in gpt, and I cannot imagine wanting the mmmhms, the yesses, the laughs, in my ai interaction. I want to ask a structured question and get a structured meaningful response. Informative and structured are really the KPIs. The umms and ahms of existing gpt advanced voice are annoying enough, the recent increased usage of first person almost a deal breaker (when asking for bike technique on lose surfaces yesterday, it literally gave me "back when I was learning bikes riding" story - eww).
Fascinating to see the architectural advances though, even when they deliver something I personally don't need :)
100% agree, its also disturbing that they want to make seem like a human.
I suspect most people would prefer it to behave like the computer in star trek. just be there, and be responsive in direct polite ways. dont try to be a friend, dont try to pretend its people. its not. its fucking code.
People here? Maybe. The rest of the world? I really don't think so! From what I've seen, people really don't like when these models behave robotically, they seem to want them to become indistinguishable from humans in their view, with the biggest difference being that the model should not disagree with them if they don't want it at that model. I've seen way too many people that explicitly want a "friend that never says no to me" type of thing from LLMs. That's far from everyone, but that's literally the second most wanted use case I've seen from random people I've met, with the first being "Google but easier".
When I go into listening node, I listen. Actively and intensely.
Apparently it unnerves people. My wife coaches me to give occasional Yes,Go On, or UhHuh. But it's a conscious, learned, active mechanism for me. Intuitively, I'll tell you if we've weered off my desired conversation path and I'd ask the same courtesy. I've learned very late in life it's apparently an autism thing. Either way, I don't seek mmms and umms in real live people and I especially
don't need fake ones in a machine :)
I watched the demo video. Isn't that agent's voice too hasty in responding? Maybe that's what they (OpenAI) are trying to show off as full-duplex tech, but I can't shake the feeling that I'll feel annoyed if the AI agent interrupts me when I'm speaking....
The potential conversational dynamics of people telling each other "quiet!" after they pick up the habit from talking with AI will be interesting. It could lead to people being more assertive and thoughtful, or it could be contentious and rude.
Awesome that they've improved that aspect of voice chat, though.
A nightmare scenario would be that people become so accustomed to talking to agreeable AI, that they lose the inability to talk to anything that disagrees with them or has different perspectives with responses that don't include stroking the ego.
It's a very interesting phenomenon. It's often said that famous stars become delusional exactly because they are surrounded by yes-men who are too afraid of rocking the boat and of losing their relationship with the star.
But if I have to think of my own experiences here, I would say that overly agreeable people become tiresome pretty quickly. To me their perspective does not offer anything of value without any pushback, as it certainly doesn't help with grounding my own thoughts. Perhaps it's why being too nice makes it difficult to form deeper bonds, and maybe paradoxically it is therefore a good thing that LLMs are overly agreeable.
It probably also depends on one's mindset - those who are interested in growing could be more likely interested in opposing views, while those who perceive that they have already "made it" (e.g. stars) perhaps don't care so much and prefer an agreeable tone.
GPT-Live does not support video at this point, but we're working hard to introduce it soon. In the meantime, our previous Advanced Voice Mode will continue to be available and supports video.
Thanks for the reply, Atty. So I guess I'm holding it wrong?
For some reason, I can't use the camera while in Live mode. The only option I see is the plus item, which does show the camera, but when I open it up and ask "Are you seeing my camera?" it will always say no and recommend me to open it.
Feels like the official camera icon does not show up for me? iPhone 13, ChatGPT Pro subscription.
Ah yes — the camera icon is to take a photo, not to show the model video in real-time. Try taking the photo and uploading it! If you're having trouble, please share a screenshot and the build number (Settings > About) with me via email at atty@openai.com.
The live translation demo reminds me of the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This could be very valuable to have in your headphones while travelling.
Not super impressed by the model constantly interrupting the user in the other demos though.
For important and learning tasks,I would not use the voice feature as it was way too short and 'conversational'. I would use the 'record' feature and have it read the long, articulate answer to me. If this new conversation feature doesn't feel like I'm 'hanging out' with a friend, but actual longer high content answers, It'll win me over. Otherwise I thought the previous conversation mode was way too watered down and I found myself getting frustrated having to keep asking many questions to further probe down to the details. I don't know, these things don't change much, we'll see.
I don't have many opinions about how individuals use this tech (although the AI as friend trend is a bummer for many reasons), but have maaaany (negative) opinions about the customer service industrial complex that's already using this in what seems to be an attempt to fool people into thinking they're speaking to a real person. Which is why I now, like a freak I never thought I'd need become, always ask "Am I speaking to a bot or a human?" when dealing with CS. So far, it's worked, and the bot transfers me. But, I fear the bot will eventually be programmed to lie abiht that, as well.
Hopefully this also means it does better with "interruptions". I have used ChatGPT Voice in the car before and sometimes car/road noises will cause it to stop responding in the middle.
I used it to help me figure out how to turn off a feature in the rental car I was in (adaptive cruise control, I love it but snow blocked the sensor and I wanted just normal cruise control but couldn't figure it out while driving).
This kind of voice chat is awesome and I'll be even more excited when open models have this functionality. I'd love something like this paired with Home Assistant (assuming we ever get decent hardware).
I like this and felt like some of it was much more fluid; but was I alone in feeling like the interjected "uh-huh" or "yeah?" moments felt a little jarring?
Almost felt a bit *uncanny valley* for what "natural" conversation is supposed to be like. If the "uh huh" isn't timed correctly, it'll feel like a zoom call with lag.
Every second of the interaction is uncomfortable to me, but I also have extreme difficulty with video calls with humans. The latency completely breaks my mind.
It was probably the original intent of OpenAI working with Apple ... but clearly there was a reason why Apple ditched OpenAI for Google/Gemini models instead.
I have built a few voice based integrations into my applications that use these live agents (gpt and gemini), but they are always too expensive to be viable. I have to end up hacking up context and turning on and off in ways that are very fragile. It'll end up being $2-5 for about the 30ish minute sessions I typically end up with, and it throws the price of the product I'm making completely out of whack.
It would be great if we could have AI that wasn't trying to emulate a human. When it expresses emotion, we should see that as a bug that needs to be fixed.
I was missing the part where the grandmas are saying "I have absolutely no idea what I just said" :D
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Besides that really nice demo I will give this a try, I tried some voice models before and the issue is I will ask a question, get a answer withing the next ~1 sentence and then the usual LLM bs follows which I just wanted to skip at that point
The new architecture makes sense, it seems many of the remaining problems like noise and interruptions are at the sound processing and integration level rather than at an architectural or model level now which makes for an exciting new era.
Looking forward to a list of support languages. This would be amazing for language listening/speaking practice.
Yes I know it doesn't replace the talking to real people and "immersion". But cheaper than a flight
I use AI for my job. I understand the impact (as much as anyone can) that it will have on society. I recognize the value.
But I just want to say that talking with AI casually is critically lame. I cringe every time I have to ask my Google Home to turn on the lights and people are having full-on conversations with it? And, imo, dangerous considering how sycophantic AI is. The stupidest, most gullible, most insecure person right now is looking at this thinking they are about to make a new friend.
Absolutely can't wait to try this for language practice. The advanced voice mode is great but ultimately just doesn't work that well and doesn't have the feel of a natural conversation.
This voice is awful, possibly one of the worst AI/computer voices I have heard in like two years now - what's up with that? Is this seriously the best a company burning this much money can do, and they consider this acceptable to release? Like two syllables in and my first response was to grimace and physically cringe. Does anyone here think this sounds good, or even just "fine enough"?
Do engineers that work on this for long periods of time stop seeing the forest for the trees and think this could be mistaken as human? I'm saying this as someone that assumes all narration/most VO work will be fully AI fairly soon (for better or worse.)...
What don't you like about the voice? Geniune question, I'm not using it in English but I think it sounds fine in my language, and it's an improvement over the previous one.
I do not fully understand the complexity behind achieving full-duplex but I hope this sets the bar for Anthropic to follow. Turn-based simplex is yesterday.
Great to hear about full-duplex. When using voice mode historically, it was infuriating to have the AI go on a long-winded rant or explanation and I would be shouting again and again "stop. shut up. shut up! shut up!!!"; I just needed a clean way to interrupt it.
You can choose among 9 voices in the app, all newly refreshed for GPT-Live. If you meant whether it can detect multiple people, it can (like in the livestream), but not always perfect. Would love to hear your feedback once you try it.
watched the live translation video very impressive
Seems like a shift from previous voice models where it sequentially processes voice to text then feeds it to LLM and then back which cant escape the clunky lag
not sure how pipecat stands now, gpt live seems like it takes audio tokens and does inference on it directly
I've wondered if this would happen, although doing inference directly on speech tokens would seem to imply an entirely different model (trained on lots and lots of actual speech).
this is excellent, I've been meaning to update my phone-dialer.apk "fake phone conversation" for when I'm trying to get out of a social sitation (not joking)
Is it possible to create a "companion" of sorts with this model, using, say, an RPi and a speaker + microphone? Not for advanced scientific brainstorming, but for seniors who are often alone in their homes.
Try being a 90-year old with minimal social contact and nobody to talk to, wasting away in front of a TV blasting NewsMax or Fox News ... does that sound like Heaven or Hell?
Substituting one form of media for another does not improve the hypothetical situation at all, giving a senior nothing to do all day except talk to a spreadsheet is not a solution to that senior being lonely, it is a false dichotomy. Far lower tech solutions can be (and are) used. In my locale we have volunteer schoolchildren active in the community, as far as I know that's quite common, and even half an hour biweekly with a fake grandkid is many orders of magnitude healthier and more meaningful than swapping out their TV for this generation's take on Fox News.
It goes without saying all these tools are still largely in their pre-advertising state, it won't last.
I speak from experience. The last few weekends I've been taking a friend to see her grandma at a Senior Facility in Sonoma County, and it is really depressing to watch them either lying in bed, listlessly, or in a wheelchair, gazing away in the distance.
They need interaction. And a suitably prompted LLM _can_ provide such interaction. I'm not saying hook them up with ChatGPT and let them loose, but that with the right harnesses and guardrails, they could have a more interactive life.
If an idiot has this on in the subway my conversations are surveilled. What is the antidote? Train another model to talk about bombs etc. and flood the clanker (and by extension the FBI)?
I have now had a chance to use it, and it never interrupted me. Weird call for the video to include that. Works very well, and can even mash up languages.
This had to land before there new device could be launched, i.e. human to AI full duplex interaction, Apple should be worried. They fumbled so hard on AI.
I am wondering for whom this new device even would be. Because phones work quite well for this use case and much more and everyone already has a phone.
At first I was really impressed, I thought granny was the voice. But it turns out it's the same kind of annoying voice and tone. And then Constance starts talking to it and it immediately cuts her off at 1:05, after they just explained it was better at conversation flow.
Seems a bit disappointing, but the 3 overlapping questions example was impressive.
This is getting way too dystopian for my taste. People in the know need to stop pushing the narrative that this is somehow anything more than statistical autocomplete.
Didn't Standard Intelligence release a duplex model two years ago? Sounds disingenuous to market this as a new generation of voice models, when it is really OpenAI finally catching up to the current generation after two years.
I just tried this and I find the constant interruptions infuriating: ah, alright, mh, mh-mh, go on, etc.
This means the model already reliably detected my point/question isn’t finished.
Please give me an option or dial to tone down the back channel noise.
Haven't tried this, but talking to Claude in its app is so much better than talking to Siri that Apple should be ashamed. It got every word perfectly the first time, including programming / project management terms.
Meanwhile, Siri struggles to send basic texts to my kids.
I hope they fixed the models in that they don't interrupt and jump in and that you can order them to be silent. Previous model could not be silent and always cut me off and spoke over me.
I for one am greatly looking forward to the day these kind of voice models can be run locally. It seems like the gap between open-weight and frontier is way larger for voice models than coding/language models.
Probably not _as_ good, but you can run gemma 4 for the ears/brain (accepts audio input), and kokoro TTS for the mouth. You want something like silero VAD sitting in front of the LLM so you aren't passing wasteful audio to gemma 4, so you send only voice activity segments. I type all this because I tried it out recently as a Zork experience, seeing how creative Gemma 4 12B could be. It was surprisingly good!
Yeah, I mostly mean for the TTS, which in my testing is flat and has no emotional register, or no nuanced variation. OpenAI speech in my experience is very good at things like communicating understanding or questions non-verbally using intonation, and I'm yet to see a local TTS model that will do contextual intonation well at all.
What the fuck is the rationale to make this? I can kinda see the rationale behind Facebook and social media, they _could_ be useful. But this? This is like making a nuclear bomb out in public. The world is going to get a LOT worse in the next 20 years. I am not talking about energy usage. I am talking about a society where everyone is TRULY inside their own bubble of creation.
Yeah, I mean - I know that people do this in real life, but when I encountered this recently while trying GPT-Live, it was truly annoying - I felt like it kept causing me to lose my train of thought. Perhaps if it was a bit more adaptive or could even be turned off.. but if it does this every.. single... time... I am saying something and I pause for a second... ugh.
Basically have an older lady (not their target audience) blatantly reading a teleprompter.
Why are they going after this audience? Retired people have no use for delegated tasks or information. They also are the least likely to use it and not get frustrated.
They most definitely did not solve real time translation yet. The French in the video is barely understandable, both the translation and the pronunciation are the quality of an American who hasn't used French since high-school.
I had preview access to this one for a few weeks. It's very good. I had one conversation that lasted a full hour while I was walking the dog, got some good brainstorming done against one of my projects.
The best feature is that it can delegate questions out to GPT-5.5 in the background, so you're no longer restricted to a voice model that's several years behind the frontier.
I did report a fun bug with it though: it was interrupting me and laughing at my (not really intended as) jokes while I was still talking! They seem to have clamped that behavior down thankfully, it felt a bit rude and condescending.
Is it responsive to personality settings? I actively don't want fake AI girlfriend, but I do get a ton of value out of voice mode. Looking forward to trying this but hoping it's not a creepy overdone mess (like Sesame). Expectations are they'll keep doubling down on fake AI girlfriend approach because the thing I want probably wouldn't drive engagement anywhere nearly as well
I too found this with their previous attempts.
I have my Chat personality settings stripped right down to no-fluff. I'd want voice to be more akin to the Star Trek computer, and less akin to as you said an AI friend, but previously it was tuned too personable/friend-like.
Star Trek computer voice model is something I have yet to encounter, and I've looked repeatedly :) It's not about a specific voice, it's the fact they managed to capture "I am a utility" perfectly in the voice. Our modern friends do not want to be thought of as a utility, but to engender trust and agency all of their own and that's a huge problem for me.
I thought to try voice cloning with dots.tts ( https://huggingface.co/spaces/rednote-hilab/dots.tts ), the result is pretty good, but likely wouldn't be fast enough to use on a quasi-realtime basis:
Input clip: https://vocaroo.com/19QtEPtwTjOS
Prompt text: There are 14 varieties of tomato soup available from this replicator. With rice, with vegetables, Bolian style, with pasta specify hot or chilled.
Output: https://vocaroo.com/1f3XuQQoSzwB
I think the request here is not about sounding like Majel Barrett but in keeping the output extremely terse and unobtrusive.
There's been a few studys showing that novices love LLM output that's long, but experts hate it. As an example, I've been tasked with using some agentic PM tool to write specs, and it keeps generating these huge page long outputs with "HBR voice" bolded summaries of paragraph long bulletpoints. I.e.:
> Right-size hard, and watch the one open-ended edge. Endorse the DRI's simplifications wholesale: drop the runbook-per-alert mandate (keep 1–2 diagnostic-only runbooks for the high-priority set), and ride durability on the existing weekly incident + monthly operational reviews — no new governance. The single scope-creep risk is the coverage strand (gaps are defined by absence); bound it to gaps evidenced by real, already-missed customer-facing outages, not a proactive gap hunt. Curing ownership gaps (e.g. foo-bar, no clear owner) is finite in-scope work.
There's dozens of these every iteration. I can't imagine trying to deal with that via voice, I would just zone out after the second sentence.
When the voice models start rambling, I think of C-3PO. When Uncle Owen told 3PO to shut up and 3PO said, "Shutting up, sir."
Or even some scenes where Data did something similar.
It's funny to now experience it.
AHAHAHA. HBR Voice. Thanks man, you captured it perfectly. Finally I have a name for that.
I'm just going to say, Wow. That's a pretty incredible result. I had no idea you could clone a voice with such a short snippet of audio these days.
I've had this dream of talking to the Enterprise-D computer since I was 8 years old. Midlife-crisis me still has that dream, but hooked up to Home Assistant so it can actually do useful things too. A couple months back, I went looking around for "clean" samples of Majel's voice as the computer but didn't have a lot of luck. Even though there are three television series and several movies, pretty much all of them have some amount of background noise, bleeps, bloops, or warp core thrum. (As this one does.) There may be modern ways to clean those up without affecting her voice much, but I haven't dug into that yet.
There are a few audiobooks narrated by Majel Barrett but obviously her role as the computer was proper voice acting and so the books would not be good source material.
There were also a few games/CD-ROM (Omnipedia) with some samples, but they did not bother to post-process them for that lofi Enterprise-D computer feel. Can _probably_ be replicated fairly faithfully after the fact, but I only know a _little_ about audio post-processing.
According to her son (Rod Roddenberry), Majel sat down in a studio and recorded audio samples specifically for the purpose of having her voice cloned someday for future Star Trek stories. However, those haven't been released publicly. (And likely never will, but I can dream, can't I?)
Edit: I played with your samples and the time it takes to generate the output audio is pretty brutal. Too slow for interactive use. Maybe that's a limitation of the HF-hosted app, though.
If you read their GitHub README and the code, it's possible to separate and cache the voice cloning step, and they have some streaming variant with low first chunk latency. I only played with it via Hugging Face. It is astonishingly good with certain rare accents, and it responds well to longer input clips
That is pretty incredible with such a small amount of input. Makes me want to check out dots.tts myself!
I just tell them to talk like Jarvis. I tried the "cold logic" prompt but it turned them into a bunch of assholes.
I noticed that too, I guess the content in the training data suggests that when some text self-identifies as "cold, hard logic" it additionally assumes a mean tone. Additionally it makes responses more likely to disagree even when given inputs that are more or less valid. A while ago I tested out giving some idea to a model with the "hard logic" prompt, then taking its own output, reverting the conversation and giving it its own statement again, making it disagree with the very same statement it just made itself. This was mostly just humorous, and doesn't indicate too much, after all both statements might've been wrong in some way, but the statement itself was moreso an opinion with no fully right answer, showing this tendency to disagree.
I guess when we tell models to use "cold logic" they don't interpret that purely definitionally, but moreso with what this statement usually implies, which is often a disagreement between two people, one trying to leverage supposed logic to disagree and denigrate the other party, oftentimes actually arguing out of emotion and not the logic they claim to use. This probably occurs enough to give model responses a mean tint. That's my theory on why this could occur at least.
For many years, I've wanted ED-209 (robocop) voice from something like espeak or similar. Still can't find anything good.
Not for chat, just as a way to make notification messages that sound like ED-209.
One popular speech synth from back in the day, I believe it was WillowTalk, had a voice called Colossus, which sounded like the voice module of the computer from Colossus: The Forbin Project. This voice was used for that of CATS in the famous "All your base are belong to us" Flash video.
Another WillowTalk voice was a clone of DECtalk's Perfect Paul good enough to be used as the voice in the MC Hawking rap recordings.
I am having a hell of a time googling for WillowTalk, do you know any links/places where I can learn more? Maybe even download something?
It came from a company called Willow Pond Software. That seems to narrow searches down.
WillowTalk is apparently still of interest to Half-Life modders because another WillowTalk voice, possibly a clone of DECtalk's Huge Harry, was used as the Black Mesa VOX facility-wide announcement system in the original Half-Life.
I think that's mostly just a frequency shift :) You could probably recreate it with another model and some effects on top. Also, why the hell not for voice mode haha.
You can using chatterbox and a couple voice to voice models. Sorry I don’t recall the whole process but you can YouTube Star Trek computer voice AI.
I explicitly prompt my small local models to channel that kind of energy. It's one of few ways to get them to just spit it out without yapping on about temperature- and humidity-appropriate activities when I just asked if it'll rain this week.
You do have to do it carefully and not literally say "Star Trek" or else it'll start yapping about main shields being at full strength.
Well you remember how Captain Kirk had his computer speak to him in a special female voice, and he was "married" to the ship ;)
It’s 2026 what the customer wants is probably an indication of what not to do if you’re a hyperscaler.
Whoever ends up actually winning after the crash will be the ones who figure out the needs of users, not the needs of the financial machinations of the companies trying to grab land.
> "The best feature is that it can delegate questions out to GPT-5.5 in the background, so you're no longer restricted to a voice model that's several years behind the frontier."
Wow. That's exactly what I hoped they would do.
This issue has held me back from using ChatGPT's voice mode as much as I otherwise would have, because I also use it for brainstorming while commuting, exercising, etc., and don't want it to feel stuck in the past.
Funnily enough - I built this (delegation) over the weekend with Fable for a local voice chat running 100% on local LLMs, Parakeet and Kokoro. I say "...ask the thinking model..." and that redirects it to Qwen 3.6 27B on vLLM.
Can't claim originality though - it was inspired by Sesame - where their models will invoke a search, or check the weather etc, and make a vocalisation to keep you engaged.
Turn taking is one of the hardest things to get right for the exact reasons mentioned - but does seem to be the way that Claude.ai's voice works - in a very obvious way.
Anthropic + OpenAI both rug-pulled voices I liked and got used to and OpenAI really dumbed down their voices at the same time - Arbor went from Estuary English and almost "jack the lad" to some generic English accent. Claude had a Birmingham accent and said things like "shit", ending sentences like "So you're telling me that they asked for a 90% discount yeah?" - then it changed overnight to a mock Derbyshire accent with a dull tone.
ChatGPT's voice also gaslights me for conventional opinions - "my Eastern European neighbour helped me lift a wardrobe upstairs - something you just can't ask your typical neighbour neighbour"... then you get a full on left-leaning lecture from the safety layers rather than a head nod or "what luck!"
Claude + Sesame are nowhere near as overbearing.
In both cases - from edgy and engaging to something that just didn't gel.
The point of making my own assistant is that I can talk for as long as I want, episodic memory is personal and private, there's no "trust me bro, we're a big corporation" vibes.
This was not my first attempt - when I had a bunch of Opus credit around Jan/Feb - I tried really hard and created something that was not good enough. What I have now, is working, and each session is training Claude/Codex on what to tune, and to fix.
"Just had a convo - can you look into what happened?" And if it's one I don't mind sharing with the model - I'll say, "and what did you think of the questions I asked?" Sometimes it'll give a lovely commentary on how the model did.
af_heart is probably the smoothest voice - but yes it's more like another commented - more "StarTrek" than "telesales assistant that pauses and laughs at your jokes".
If you're on a similar path and want something full duplex - the go to solution is PersonaPlex from Nvidia based upon Moshi.
I did a simar thing a while back... voice interface for Hermes with Kokoro and Qwen ASR.
I highly recommend simply enjoying the walk.
I think you're missing the counterfactual. I now have two choices: 1) sit behind my desk and work, or 2) walk and talk something out.
Before this model, the voice models were pretty dumb and annoying to work with. We'll see if this changes that.
3) walk and think
You could walk and talk it out without anyone on the other end too. Works for me, at least. People just assume I'm on the phone.
Seems a bit knee jerk. I go on walks and bike rides all the time. A couple of times I’ve used voice mode and it’s been interesting. I could have listened to music or a podcast, listen to YouTube or just unplug. But every walk is different.
If you’re uncomfortable with this new world, and I’m sure I am even as I participate, you could tell us more about that?
Every time something along these lines is posted, comments like this show up.
The thing I don't get is...no one would say this about listening to a podcast or audiobook on a walk.
I'm not sure why people choose to demonize this specific use of time during walks.
> ...no one would say this about listening to a podcast or audiobook on a walk.
I highly recommend simply enjoying the walk. :)
This may not be you, but the people who have said that to me irl walk significantly less than I do. And saying these things to people who don't yet exercise can make them far less likely to start as it's a far bigger step to do so. Podcasts and recorded lectures are what got me exercising in the first place, because I was excited to hear the next part. I now only have headprones on some of my walks, but the gateway drug of entertainment was a very useful stepping stone. And still often better than sitting at a desk.
People can enjoy different things, people can be neurodiverse, different strokes for different things, etc.
True, and they can recommend things too, we're all in agreement
The unprompted recommendation is condescending and carries a holier than you attitude.
It's coming from a place of objecting to burnout/overwork culture.
Recently I witnessed a CTO mention in a public channel that with Claude remote control people can now work while getting a coffee or other breaks during the day.
Tech is actively moving in a direction of destroying all the gains from the labour movement in service of enriching capital out of a combination of FOMO or fear of being replaced.
So yeah, when folks say "hey look now I can even work during leisure activities!" yeah, the reaction is negative.
I'm far more surprised that this surprises you.
>It's coming from a place of objecting to burnout/overwork culture.
Sure, but that's not everyone. I want this because it's hard to carve out time for my fun side projects. :)
Also, not everyone feels burnt out or overworked, and may find their actual work enjoyable. I've definitely had many showers where I've been thinking about interesting work problems and never felt particularly burdened by it (quite the opposite, in fact).
Nah.
Workers in 2026, even non-tech workers have an easier life than workers alive at any other point in human history.
Yes ofc there are problems - collectivist land use laws that ban construction near homeowners continue to drive housing costs higher for example. But if you asked any worker today if they would have preferred to be alive 40 or 400 years ago I would be shocked if any said yes.
So I'm clear: as long as our jobs don't devolve to 100 hours a week in a sweat shop or tilling the earth for the lord of our fiefdom, we should just sit back and be happy?
Is that what I should take away from your comment?
I don't have a strong opinion either way but it seems unlikely that this was the takeaway
That's a pretty wild take. There used to be a lot of good paying union jobs. It was much better to be a worker before Reaganism/Thatcherism.
It’s funny. I was looking at my GH activity graph. It’s been pretty solid green, for years. I stay busy.
But since I’ve been using an LLM, it’s been bright green.
I always check in code manually. I don’t let the LLM do it.
I hear you, though I will point out that OP said “projects”. Could be a house remodel, ebike build, any manner of project.
Sure but context matters and given this is Hacker News, a lot of discussion centers around tech as a profession (and that's doubly true for AI adoption). You can forgive folks for jumping to natural conclusions. :D
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It reminds me of that old parable where the acolyte asks the priest "Father, can I smoke while I pray?" and gets told "No, you should be focusing on praying. That wouldn't be respectful". But then he says "Can I pray while I smoke?" and gets told "of course, you can pray at any time".
If it's 'walking time', I probably don't want to consume that with work. But if it's 'working time', it could be great to have a nice walk during it.
I highly recommend not patronizing adults for doing what they want or feel is appropriate when they're walking their dog.
Sometimes I want to learn something while I walk. Sometimes I want to listen to stories. Sometimes I want to just be present. All are good. I highly recommend letting people enjoy whatever they enjoy.
I often enjoy walking and doing something else at the same time. Usually thinking through a problem…
Given the personality type common on HN, I imagine that the GP, even if unplugged from all technology on their walk, wouldn't be in a mindful state of enjoying their surroundings, but rather would be "lost in the clouds", stewing on the same ideas/thoughts/problems; but with those thoughts going more in circles, due to a lack of ability to verify anything.
Literally me. Everyone is different, and that's fine. But I don't have the privilege of living in an area where I can talk to people about the things I am thinking through. It's very rural. Having a _utility_ that can act as a sounding board while I spew out my thoughts on a walk is a really meaningful improvement to my current situation.
… but it sounds like they did enjoy the walk, doesn’t it?
I take my dog for walks everyday and I think she 100% of the times enjoys it but me maybe only 20-30%
One thing has remained constant over the last little period of time. AI boosters have zero taste.
I never considered that how I spend my time while walking my dog might be a matter of "taste".
Perhaps that's the definition of taste (or lack of).
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My god. It’s useful for coding… and that’s it. It’s not going to change the world the way you think.
there's no benefit to anyone for being so reductive, from whichever side you're on.
As a progressive person, the constructive thing is to try to see how to harness it for good or how to fight it, it's not to pretend that it's weak. It's not weak.
> we know pretty well at this point that this is world warping technology (either for good or bad), not a small matter of taste.
And what are you doing about it?
I professionally use it to design pharmaceutical drugs, essentially I do my best to harness the good sides of it
Not saying you aren't good at your job but this statement gives me pause. Given what I see on the daily as output from models I hope there's still a lot of human interrupt behind the wheel with respect to the design of drugs.
Every drug indeed has a huge burden of proof before it is distributed to humans, including the 3 levels of FDA clinical drug trials that cost billions of dollars, as well as all the internal testing we do beforehand.
How are models improving your process? And how do you grapple with model inconsistencies?
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Isn’t that a life advice?
I viewed jjulius' post as a cry for help, therefore I don't consider it unsolicited.
That's anti life-advice
It’s an anti life-advice life-advice
Is it a dumb-down version of GPT like the current voice model? At least in french, I find the current GPT voice mode to be useless, to the point I only use the dication mode. I would ask a question and it would answer something along "That's a interesting question. I can help you with that. Anything you want to know about X?" I would ask again and it would answer the same kind of non answer.
Click through to the link, the answer is no it uses the latest gpt models now.
> the answer is no it uses the latest gpt models now.
Actually it says it _can_ delegate to the latest models. Seems reasonable to ask how the voice model does when it doesn't delegate (or while waiting for the delegated answer).
I haven't stress-tested it, but I would imagine it approaches complex problems the same way a human with a phone in their pocket would — that is, by having a degree of awareness of the confidence it has in its own knowledge in some areas; where, when it "realizes that it doesn't know", it blocks the conversation with statements like "I don't know, let me check."
I say this because this is already how ChatGPT works internally when using its "auto" mode; the version of the "fast" model used in the "auto" mode does the same "notice your ignorance and bring in the heavy model" thing, just silently, rather than mentioning that it's doing it.
(If someone has actually run the experiment, please chime in!)
> I did report a fun bug with it though: it was interrupting me and laughing at my (not really intended as) jokes while I was still talking! They seem to have clamped that behavior down thankfully, it felt a bit rude and condescending.
Some times I'm still amazed that AI "gets" humour much more effectively than the character of Data did before his emotion chip, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4VZ5kQIdV0
Other times I'm amazed in the opposite way, that the script writers cover basically the same talking points about the character as we have today about LLMs, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBJCYHwyZhw
I love the UX of voice mode. I’ve always hated voice models.
Gemini’s being particularly egregious (always ending in some deranged question, can not reliably be prompted away) prompted me to build my own client for my real harness that simply does STT -> model -> TTS (both being independently useful).
I guess I see some value in a model responding quickly and with more nuance, but it’s not much. I can wait for it to finish. I’d much rather have it be actually useful. I’m not looking for a digital friend.
The delegation feature lets me see some value in a voice model for orchestration type features. But in either case, I don’t really like (or understand why others would like) talking to a model with different features and quirks just because I’m using a different medium to communicate over.
I’ve spent my time very similarly working on my own voice stack project, but having also seen how non-developers use AI or experience technology in general, I truly think they are better served with a different UX and product than what we have.
In other words, if you’re building your own voice inference tooling you’re just about the polar opposite user demographic than the one that truly needs and will value this. You’re using voice as a medium of convenience doing what existing models are technically and practically “shaped” to be able to do, knowing how they work well enough that conversation is more like typing/prompting with your voice than a natural interface. I’m guilty of this myself but have you ever even paid for a voice/audio model or hardware?
Compare that to the millions of people with an Alexa device in their home who buy products through it, or who prefer calling support to get a human over poring over technical documentation. They’re actually very close to finally getting a version of “Alexa” that lives up to its promise and I’m happy for them
I have built out something similar that let's me use my phone's hardware buttons to open an input stream with the mic for my Hermes agent over my matrix gateway and then has it play back with a local TTS model on my Pixel 10 Pro.
But the Deepseek v4 flash model I am using through OpenRouter is killing me on latency. Any suggestions to improve that?
I should give these voice models another try.
I have friends who have brainstormed with an LLM (voice chat) for 10-30 minutes, and reported very positive experiences.
When I speak to one - while I'm impressed at how far they've progressed - the LLM just doesn't talk like someone I'd want to discuss a technical problem with (the way I would with a human).
(And my friends aren't even using a custom prompt - some of them are just talking to the default Gemini on their phone!)
I also love exploring ideas like this. The problem that made me stop using Gemini is that it would always try really hard against all my prompting to ask a stupid question at the end of its response that would completely derail my train of thought.
But does it generate good pelicans?
I had an enjoyable conversation with it just now where it repeatedly told me it had generated an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle along with a clickable data: link. Obviously, this is just harness polish. Overall, it's quite impressive.
Someday we'll have a tokeniser that works directly on human speech instead of doing speech-to-text and text-to-speech steps in between.
How did you give it access to your projects? That’s something I never thought does work as the voice model has no access outside of its scope?
I didn't mean the "projects" feature. I described my projects to it, had it search for extra details and pasted relevant inflection into the session before starting the voice chat.
>The best feature is that it can delegate questions out to GPT-5.5 in the background, so you're no longer restricted to a voice model that's several years behind the frontier.
Ahh, this makes sense. I was wondering when they would start doing this. I stopped using voice mode all together because it was frustrating talking to a dumb AI, when most of the time I discuss things with Opus 4.8 or gpt 5.5.
I was working on a phone call agent recently, and thought about doing this. It makes sense
Cool, was this conversation through the chatgpt app?
Yes, ChatGPT on iPhone.
Does it have full access to your chat history, project files, etc? That's the biggest limitation I have with voice mode right now, if I ask it about something I chatted about before (even in the same conversation) it has zero recollection of it.
You can start a chat in an existing session after pasting data into that session and it can then talk about that content. I haven't tried it with projects.
Cool it sounds like they have improved. This the first time I tried back in the day voice chats were different and you could not get the transcript after the fact.
Can it in some way do some action based on the talk? For example, can it summarize the brainstorming into a text file, post it somewhere etc.?
At the end of the session I stop the voice mode and then type into my phone "write this up as bulletin points".
About 2 years ago I used to have conversations with GPT while walking the dog. It really emphasized the need to think before you speak, but you had to think fast before it hung up on you.
Thank you for testing and the feedback Simon!
Have you compared it to grok in teslas?
Wait, you can talk to Teslas now? How did I miss thiS? Can I get a red led bar and basically have a KITT?
Yes! Hey Grok was shipped to all Ryzen-based Teslas a year ago, I think. I don't use it but those that have found it useful.
the cybertruck seems designed for this KITT fantasy of yours
Dammit! I live in Europe and the cyber truck isn't even available here..
That said a huge pickup truck is about as far as you can get from a Camaro... Then again I'm not exactly David Hasslehoff myself either... Meh if it talks that's close enough!
> Dammit! I live in Europe and the cyber truck isn't even available here..
Europeans are notorious for their good taste.
does it work in codex?
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That is a nice idea and all, but perhaps there are things our friends aren't good at talking about. Perhaps something that is very related to a work project? Or like when I go down the rabbit hole discussing quantum mechanics and astro physics with ChatGPT because none of my friends understand that at even my level, and I'm looking to learn more about it from someone/something that does know more than me.
I'm looking forward to trying this out because I find that doing discovery on certain things feels more natural with voice. The previous voice chat was such a dumb GPT-4 era model that I resorted to using the dictate feature with GPT-5.5 and had it read the text response back to me.
This is the opposite direction AI should be going. Human relationships are the most valuable thing we have, and so, naturally, technology seeks to intermediate and now replace them.
I'm not Catholic, but this podcast presents a very interesting argument against talking to AI as if they were human: https://newpolity.com/podcasts-hub/debate-chatbots
Most of what AI does is already in wrong direction. Not just human-to-human interaction, it took away thinking, creative work, sensory perception (glasses) and responses. People call it as helping humans, but I call it as sucking away the "human-ness" from humans.
After the damage is done, the mega corps would simply shrug and will say "Well, we were just responding to our business competition" The business knows no human-ness, because it is not a human. Businesses and machines are creatures that see humans as their fodder. And humans created these, assuming it is progress, to have businesses and machines. We call it progress because it required our mind power and it helped us to dominate other species. Dolphins are laughing at us.
I don't understand this line of reasoning. How are you hindered from doing any of those things? What part of "AI can now do X" makes it so you can't also do X?
Fewer people aren't staring into their phones or talking to them -- makes your social antennas pick up automatically on not wanting to disturb them (lest you draw their ire for not having the social antennas long enough to pick up on the fact they're "busy and don't want to engage with you" like a gymrat with AirPods to signal they're there to pump in peace and quiet listening to their favourite playlist, not talk to strangers). Happened to me already many times just with people scrolling their phone instead of talking and not wanting to talk in particular either, not to me at least. And no -- I am not talking about bothering strangers in the gym etc, I am talking about sitting at the lunch table where half of the people look into their phones -- they aren't actually interested in talking, it turns out.
Our devices have now increased the distance _between_ us -- it's not about _you_ being able to "do X" -- talking to others is not _you_ doing it, it's you _and the other person_ doing it _together_. You can't be doing anything together consentually when the other person is in the habit of talking with their AI, or doomscrolling for that matter.
Social people will be fine, I think this tech is far more important for lonely people who for any reason don't get to socialize much (if at all), this is especially common in older people. These people might not have any other alternatives.
> I think this tech is far more important for lonely people who for any reason don't get to socialize much (if at all), this is especially common in older people.
Uhm, those lonely people need to get out and start talking. How is this going to help society? This is going to make it worse.
Oh that kid is kinda quite and sad? Throw him an iPad. Oh that adult is kinda bored and wandering aimlessly? Throw him into a casino. Oh that adult is kinda lonely and feels like they don't have anyone they can talk to about their life? Give them LLM companionship.
Yep, it is over for humanity. People simply don't understand externalities.
What about people with disabilities, physical or mental, who can't get out, old people with no family or family who doesn't care? In theory it would be great if everyone got some attention and socialized, in reality a lot of people in society are forgotten, no one wants to talk to them.
For some of these people even talking to a robot would likely be a huge improvement in quality of life, and that's just talking. If said robots could also help them out in real life, sort of like a personal assistant, that would be even better.
Who’s paying for this? Nice sentiment, but last I checked prices weren’t coming down, and we’re talking about a cohort that doesn’t generally have a ton of extra cash.
These people are an opportunity for the rest of us to be better people, to show compassion and mercy. They are not worthless to the rest of society. Giving them LLM companions says that they are — that their only self-worth is their feelings.
> What about people with disabilities, physical or mental, who can't get out, old people with no family or family who doesn't care? In theory it would be great if everyone got some attention and socialized, in reality a lot of people in society are forgotten, no one wants to talk to them.
I mentioned in another comment that I totally get it for these people. You are using the extreme cases to justify opioid for the masses. The moment you "solved" human loneliness and interacting by giving them drugged up with chatbots, its over. I am telling you, it is over.
AI psychosis is bad enough as it is with really poor imitation. The moment it can imitate and fool the average person, I just don't see why most people need real friends anymore. We will NEVER be able to get it out of kids hand, the cats out of the bag. You think kids growing up with social media and ipad is bad? Lets see what happens if they live in actual fantasy land with their robotic friends.
I don't even know if I want to live in that world anymore.
Also, your solution to lonely people with disabilities or old age is to create robotic "Friends" for them? This is just sickening. You might as well just drug them. The _actual_ solution is to create a compassionate society where this doesn't happen. The solution to overworked society isn't more opium to relieve the pain.
>Uhm, those lonely people need to get out and start talking.
Great, what is being done to help that happen?
Unironically just "man up". I get that there are some people that have actual sickness that prevents them from socializing but your little anxiety does not count. Believe me, I know I have the same problem. I quite literally had no friends for almost 7 years or after highschool. Society can't afford to babysit a 30 years old man that have anxiety and doesn't want to put any effort. My parent had to call me to check if I am alive, and even then, I don't feel like talking to them after months of no talking. I had zero interest to form any kind of relationship. That feeling that you have when you are feeling like "I would rather just order Uber", yea, you need to OVERCOME that. That is the effort. Ruminating, thinking and fantasizing about what "could have been" does not count.
Even if all I am saying is bullshit, "what is being done to help"? What about what is being done to make it way, way, way, way, way worse. If I had LLM companionship when I was alone, yea, I would have never gotten out of my shell. I would be stuck in there forever. Hell, why should I even talk to you? I should just argue with a robot instead.
AI girlfriends, apparently.
There are still lots of social people. I found a lot of people actually do want to talk but are just shy.
I spent a few weeks at a hostel last year. It was always kind of depressing and tense in the shared kitchen, just this heavy silence.
I don't feel comfortable around strangers, so I solved that problem by just saying hi to everyone.
Most people didn't respond much, although most of them smiled and the tension was eased. But a few of them struck up conversation and we ended up making friends.
I ended up making like, ten new friends in two weeks. And then a bunch of them ended up becoming friends with each other as well.
This is an individual solution to a systemic problem. On a personal level, it is possible to solve such problems, but generally no, the ship has sailed quite some time ago (I personally think cars are to blame).
Even if you do it, you are still swimming against the current.
>This is an individual solution to a systemic problem. On a personal level, it is possible to solve such problems
I.e. it's only a problem if you're not willing to go and strike up conversations with people. Which is not AI or mobile phones' fault. Expecting society to come up with "systemic situations" to your personal problems is a fast path to a lifetime of disappointment.
> it's only a problem if you're not willing to go and strike up conversations with people.
It is not a problem if there are other people willing to also go and strike up conversations with people. That is why GP wrote that it is a systemic problem that can be solved on a personal level.
> Expecting society to come up with "systemic situations" to your personal problems is a fast path to a lifetime of disappointment.
It is not a personal problem. It is a systemic problem. Are you conflating on purpose or do you not understand the difference?
And it is a systemic problem, all you need to do is look at the data.
Hasnt this already been thoroughly discussed? Your ability to do X degrades as you offload it more frequently, eventually to the point that you can no longer even vet the quality of the output.
I think the parent is saying now that that is attempting to be applied to "creativity" directly, as opposed to something like a shift of medium, that it threatens many peoples' ability to maintain creative capabilities.
Anecdotally I've already experienced this at work where post-AI we had a junior completely stagnate and a senior with over a decade of experience in the bay atrophy to the point that he had to be let go.
We're yet to see how this plays out, but a competing business model for creative work is emerging, where it's delegated to chatbots. Naturally, this would result in less creative work for humans.
Playing the devil's advocate a little, you say "can't also do", but that implies prohibition, not hindering. Hindering is not total like that.
It's like trying to have meaningful conversations on Twitter. You don't go to Twitter to do things like that. Can you? Sure. It's just not what the format and the conventions (and the people) lend themselves to.
I don't think there's much merit in pretending that human activities are only shaped by hard limits.
I'm no longer writing code from scratch, as I used to do before. So, very soon, it will be "AI can now do X" makes it so I can't also do X? Same with many creative works. Radio music already sounds so plastic. I lost interest in crafting my text drafts because I can just dump some ugly text and get it refined by AI.
You no longer have to grow your own food, can go to supermarket, but doesnt stop you from still doing it.
I hope that's not the future of work before UBI gets settled, because almost nobody grows their own food.
I'm confused. It feels like you are saying you did those things as a means to an end.
Like saying I no longer walk because I can drive. I no longer cook because Doordash exists. I no longer play piano because midi exists.
I mean i guess, but it seems like you didn't LIKE crafting the text or coding from scratch, you just wanted the outcome. If we are talking purely about work, I understand that its about being productive and it sucks to have a job shift to something you enjoy less.
But for daily life? I dont see how it changes, maybe its a tech thing where people think about making their daily lives more productive, but most people dont.
The human-ness is not about outcomes only. It is about doing things, thinking, achieving, socializing, sharing, bonding, feeling happy about what you did, using senses for what they evolved fir, recognizing and responding to body signals and being a biological creature. A lot of these is affected by AI.
None of those are affected by AI.
You can CHOOSE to let AI think for you or achieve for you, but you dont have to. You only HAVE to in a work context (for some people), which I admit sucks (or is great depending on who you are).
This feels like a touch grass moment.
The auto companies said the same - you don't HAVe to drive a car. But then cities were designed for cars, with far-flung work places. Now you HAVE to drive to work. Same with AI. Your world will be woven around AI, giving you no option.
I think we agree that in terms of work, AI changes a lot, and that's a big deal and disrupting to a lot of people's livelihoods.
But when I am with friends, out for a mtn bike ride or playing golf, we are just hanging out like we did 20 years ago. I dont see any cars and I am sure there are tons of AI apps for both sports that would make me "better" but I really don't care. I don't do it for the outcome.
The bonding, happiness, sharing, laughing, are all there just like it always has been and always will be.
In a personal context, you're not hindered from doing those things, so you're correct in that regard. The problem is economic and social. The AI is mediocre enough to drive the value of those things way down; possibly to zero. When something isn't valuable, people are less likely to learn it, and in the future it's less likely that anyone will actually have those skills. For example, we've slopped many illustrators out of jobs and essentially made art (an already awful paying career before AI) economically infeasible. AI illustrations kind of suck though, and even when they're technically competent they're kind of soulless. So you might say, ok, I will hire/contract an artist if I care about the quality of my illustration! Ok, but, if artists are being priced out by a machine then how long before there's no real market for finding a human to do it because all the artists gave up and got a job at starbucks and all you have left are amateurs?
This is almost certainly going to bite us in the ass long term, because eventually without human creativity you're just training AI's on other AI slop, or limiting the possible catalogue of styles to "things that existed before AI ruined every creative job". I guess the question is, what kind of future do you want to live in? One where we have a massive abundance of easy-to-create but vaguely worthless artifacts in a society that's completely devalued being good at something? It just sounds really dystopian to me.
"starving artist" is not a new concept
AI doesn't stop creative people from creating. it gives creative people an additional tool with which to create
This is repeatedly the argument rolled out by people desperate to get us to accept it at all costs.
Ai doesn’t technically stop me writing code. But it’s sucked so much joy and interest out of it, that I can’t scrape together the motivation to work on side projects anymore. It has a “chilling effect” the effects of which are notoriously indirect to observe.
why does me using AI affect your motivation at all?
Then why is it only the least creative people who use it?
> "starving artist" is not a new concept
Exactly, so why make it worse? Why try to automate an industry when the money you make off killing it wouldn't even cover the cost of your research?
> AI doesn't stop creative people from creating. it gives creative people an additional tool with which to create
I can't emphasize enough how much actual creative people hate this shit. Here's a relatively balanced take, although the headline spoils it (How AI Poisons Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeCSzEtZcUw ). Long story short, the struggle is where creative ideas come from. If you automate away the process you automate away the result.
Counter-point: I love that my rubber duck can talk (quack?) back, as well as record and summarize my thoughts on topics I'm working or stuck on.
I've wanted a good voice mode for precisely this reason. When I take my dog on a walk and I'm thinking about a bunch of problems/ideas, I'd love to have feedback and a record, or perhaps to even kick off research or ask questions to fill in gaps that would otherwise have me debating pulling out my phone to try to get an answer.
You want to be a child forever, amazed by your toys or the new things you can do. The toys won't let you grow up and become a normal human. You don't need take a dog for a walk, if you live in a normal place that allows dogs to roam freely. And you don't need to think about a "bunch of problems/ideas". Your mind is a servant of your body. And your body never asked you for that.
>You want to be a child forever, amazed by your toys or the new things you can do.
I don't think having a child-like sense of wonder at the world, or continued human ingenuity, is a sign that one wants to be a child forever.
I'm genuinely sorry if you've lost that spark.
>You don't need take a dog for a walk, if you live in a normal place that allows dogs to roam freely.
I love my dog and love walking him, even though he can freely roam on my property. I also love walking with my wife, and I don't think her agency has much reason for why I might enjoy it?
>Your mind is a servant of your body. And your body never asked you for that.
...are you okay, friend?
> "Well, we were just responding to our business competition" The business knows no humanness, because it is not a human.
Yup. Except, by God, we ought to make sure the business has unlimited free speech (i.e. campaign contributions).
Businesses have been anti-human for a while now.
If you think AI is bad, wait until I tell you about the horrors of social media who profit on controversy and division, US health insurance which profits on rejecting claims, and big pharma profiting on the opioid epidemic.
And it's not like this is new, either. Upton Sinclair was writing about this stuff a century ago with books like The Jungle.
The only difference between then and now is we "think" we're not evil today. We've lied to ourselves that "We're so much better than we were back then." Facebook wanted to bring people together originally, but they ended up providing the most toxic social media experience known to man. Facebook forgot to tell us they cared more about profit than people.
Please spare me the argument AI is the straw to break the camel's back here. The system has been broken a long time before that.
Bit naive world view. There are forces of rich and powerful who's only purpose is to maintain their status.
So thinking corporations and such were created to push human progress is laughable.
> This is the opposite direction AI should be going. Human relationships are the most valuable thing we have, and so, naturally, technology seeks to intermediate and now replace them.
Valid, but, I think, you conflate two separate things.
AI voice mode as a human socialization/conversation replacement? Cringe in my book, fully in agreement with you. Though my opinion on that aspect remains the same, regardless of whether it is done through text or voice.
AI voice mode as an alternative interface to interact with AI-as-a-tool? Great idea imo. There were a few instances where I was either too tired to type or wanted to brainstorm things in more of a freeform mode, for which a well-working voice mode would have been great.
Naturally, the current distinction between AI-as-a-personality and AI-as-a-tool exists purely on the user's end. All I know is that I want the latter a lot, and if some people want to use it for the former purpose, that's not my problem. Sadly, I think that it will be judged more on how an average person decides to use it (i.e., in the most degenerate/reductionist ways possible), as opposed to being judged on the merits of what it can actually be used for by someone who just treats it as a tool.
Basically 100% of my interaction with AI is some form of question.
But there are people that treat it like a therapist or a friend.
In my opinion, the 2nd group should be discouraged from using these agents in this way, as it cannot be healthy. But if places like Reddit etc. turn into bot towns where do the AI companies get insight into the general population? Through the eyes of their most mentally unstable users?
So I don't really see things changing, and they'll probably get worse.
Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings. Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.
This is such a poor mischaracterization of OP that I actually started agreeing with OP more.
It's also hilariously wrong. It essentially argues, implicitly, that those who don't communicate with other humans are missing out on the "most important thing in life" and cannot form a self-identity.
> Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.
I think you're mistaking their sarcasm for sincerity... especially considering the emphasis on self-identity ironically juxtaposed as originating from a decidedly non-self activity, which has all the hallmarks of being intentional...
On the other hand, reading their other content leads one to believe that they may, in fact, be serious... hmm...
It is unironically correct. Well, interaction with other human beings may not be the only important thing, but it is certainly far and away the most important thing.
An infant begins to mirror the emotions of his caregiver at 3-4 months. He can distinguish his own body in a physical mirror at 18 months.
Human beings require interaction with other human beings to identify the self. It is impossible to live without others. Read up on solitary confinement sometime - enough time without human companionship will drive any human being (except the schizoaffective) completely insane.
Yes? That's completely true.
Let's not overdramatize, though. I'm not in need, or even in mood to talk to fellow humans every minute, so time spent with a clanker is not necessary taken from my human relations budget
I also think this undersells the real value of the bot, which is to handle tasks via voice that an average human either would not or could not do.
In the video example with the grannies, the knitter is essentially wanting a PA. Regular folks don't have PAs. Even when that became a thing in the aughts they were all outsourced.
When I've used voice chat, it has often turns into rabbit holes on very niche topics. For example, I had one start about the 1996 performance of Rage Against the Machine in Portland, Oregon that was supposed to feature Wu Tang Clan. (already outside most human's knowledge) that dove into details of the club scene in Los Angeles at the time of RATM's signing to Epic Records.
Was anyone else here at that '96 show in Portland? It seems like it might be challenging to find a person on the internet able to engage on the topic.
The person may exist, but not during my fleeting interest in the subject while walking to the park.
> Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings.
Human beings tend not to be available (results vary by culture).
Also, imagine you're 82 years old and living alone (e.g. widower). It is believed that lack of interaction is a significant driver of cognitive decline (which is why being hard of hearing accelerates the onset of dementia). I wonder if having an LLM to talk to under those circumstances will decelerate cognitive decline?
Such radical carbon chauvinism is ontologically evil. May those who hold this view reincarnate as durian fruits or cockroaches.
I'm sure you'd have no problem in solitary confinement. Why not make life easy?
The implication that durians and roaches are somehow ontologically subaltern is a worse chauvinism.
> May those who hold this view reincarnate as durian fruits or cockroaches
don't you dare clump the best fruit in the world with cockroaches!
Just saying: those are also carbon-based lifeforms :D
> every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings
Very blatantly and obviously not though???
The extent to which it's true is the extent of the evilness of the technology. Go search the phrase "ai boyfriend" on reddit sometime; imagine what it will be like when society is fully baked with this shit. You're talking to AIs all day at work. You're talking to AI's when you use social media. You're talking to AIs for therapy. You're talking to AIs on dating apps.
If your answer is "well I'll simply touch grass" I agree. But most people won't which is why this is tech is immiserating and, I would argue, evil.
There’s something phenomenally powerful, uncanny, and potentially deeply corrosive about current AI. Dismissing it as “evil” is pat, and prevents any full encounter with something that now irrevocably exists and deserves and demands the consideration of thinking people.
What would you call it?
Anti human, corrosive, powerful, uncanny... but not evil?
I am fully encountering this, believe me. My conclusion is that it's evil.
Potentially corrosive. Emphasis on potentially.
Powerful and uncanny are morally neutral traits.
At root an LLM is a different kind of mind that thinks different kinds of thoughts. (I’m making no claims about consciousness here.)
It’s a novel object for us humans, and we’ll need decades to come to grips with it. In the meantime I think a bit of humility is due.
I can't help but think you're conflating cause and effect. People are using a tool (AI) to apply a band-aid to a widespread social problem (loneliness and isolation).
It's possible that an "AI boyfriend" might make someone less prone to put in the continued effort to keep rolling the dice on dating apps, but the reality is that there's a more fundamental problem driving this.
Also, I want this tool for work. Just because society is fubar and people are using this tool as a crutch for their inability to find a partner, doesn't mean I should lose better tooling that makes my life easier.
Focus on fixing the actual problem.
“Who cares about dirty syringes being left in the street, it’s really important for my work that I have access to the heroin I need”.
Things in society don’t exist in a vacuum, and “who cares about them, so long as I get my needs” is quite literally a part of the problem being discussed.
I'd argue what you're suggesting is more like trying to ban syringes, which have multiple valid uses, in order to stop dirty syringes being left in the street.
As someone with a GLP-1 user at home, responsibly depositing their syringes in an approved container that we dispose of safely at a drop site, I'd rather not have bad users inhibit my access to a tool that makes our lives better.
So do you find the selfish justification of heroin addicts in your example partially compelling, or are you betraying your own rhetorical standards?
Just because things do not exist in a vacuum doesn't mean they should be blurred and conflated until unrecognizability. There's value in explicitly anchoring the salient aspects, and getting the cause and effect right, to the extent these can be done.
Both intelligence amplification and pathological parasocialness are very real effects of this technology, and a blanket ban, a blanket halt, and similar broad and dull policies are absolutely going to be unfair and unreasonable. And even such policies would not "happen in a vacuum", there's a consequence to prohibiting something not prohibited elsewhere.
Whether we can do better is where the jury is still out. I don't think an example like your dirty needles one particularly helps with this. It's asinine and inflammatory, quite the opposite to nuance-inviting, which I believe was more towards your actual intent.
That's not what I meant, nor is "touching grass" necessarily relevant.
I use these tools at work. If I talked to other people instead of a model every time (or even just some of the time) I talk to a model, I'd be tanking everyone's productivity by constantly disrupting them, and would get worse quality responses pretty much guaranteed, if I wouldn't be just ignored outright.
This isn't to say I stopped talking to colleagues either. I reach out to them about the same amount. The time budget I took away from was the one I used to spend manually doing things, reading docs, and so on. So your entire mental model of this is just outright false there.
On a personal level, I traded off entertainment time (though for me, interacting with ChatGPT is also just a form of entertainment). Instead of staring at YouTube, I pitch silly thought experiments, explore topics, ask difficult-to-search-for questions. So once again, I did not trade off social time, meaning what you propose simply does not apply whatsoever. I do not share memes or catch up on life with it, which is what friends are for. It has no sense of actual humor, has no life of its own, and I'm not into roleplay like that. Would be just weird.
There are people who engage pathologically with LLMs, but that is neither the premiere use nor the goal. I'm sure there are also situations where people will actively approach a model over a person, but I do believe people should be able to self-regulate that decision. It gives people leverage to choose the extent and venues of their social engagement. If a topic has a community you do not wish to interact with, you can finally choose not to, while still reaping any prospective benefits (information). This can be a bad thing, but I think it's easy to see that it is also very much good.
For example, there were times where I felt more compelled to interact with ChatGPT than I felt leaving a comment here on HN. And frankly, I'm pretty sure I was way better off, and maybe the people here were too. Or a connected but different example, there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad. Relitigating them with ChatGPT enabled me to get over them in-depth, and even consider different viewpoints properly, without having to be the resident punching bag of some asshole. It's difficult for me to see these as anything but a net improvement.
There is something to be said about interactions in one's life becoming overly structured. I think a reasonable case could be made that in less structured lives, where things just kind of happen, you get more random interactions, and it is through those random interactions that you gain valuable experiences and relationships, even if there's a lot of cruft in addition [0]. That in our effort at optimization, we're making our lives inhuman to live, for the same reason people are crapping on LLMs being statistical (unreliable, imperfect) rather than hardwired (reliable, perfect). But that implies there is an optimal life, which I'm not sure exists: specifically because of this local vs global optimality tension. In complex stateful systems, you're guaranteed to hit scenarios where locally correct and globally correct behaviors are irreconcilable [1], unless you meticulously construct them such that this cannot happen, after all.
[0] like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network
[1] like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
I like this reply. I think you and I use AI the same way and probably have a lot in common. But I read things more cynically than you do. Things to ponder:
Read the GPT Live announcement. Why do they want to make it more life-like, if not to encourage the pathological engagement? Why does the model say "thank you for that insightful question"?
It is not "just a tool", that is not the goal. It is designed to be a replacement for people. Even in the most charitable "LLMs are just a tool" reading. The value proposition is to have fewer people (dramatically fewer: the "one person unicorn" with fleets of AI agents!) and for those people to spend more time talking to bots. Replace your junior employees with bots. Replace your customer service people with bots. Replace a bored teenager behind the Wendy's counter with a servile golem whose smooth plastic face can easily be wiped down when spit on.
Their metric is engagement, it is how engaged are you and how long do you spend using the application. They will do absolutely anything to get that number up. Remember, after the GPT-4O debacle, when Altman talked about implementing sex bots? That's a shark, smelling blood. Something like 30% of under 18's have used AI chatbots for "companionship," a big subset of those for ERP.
> Would be just weird.
I was a weird kid who spent 10-12 hours a day on the computer, back when computers were primarily low-res screens and boring text. Now everyone is spending 10-12 hours a day on the computer. These things change in a single generation and I'm sure you know as well as I do that boy does it happen fast.
You sound like me: an older, healthy, well-adjusted person who can understand what's going on when the model says "that's a really insightful question!" Most people are not. They will not understand when it's an AI video clone of Chris Helmsworth.
> there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad
I bet it made you feel alive.
> Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.
Is this sarcasm?
How would talking to an AI as if it were not human sound? You can probably set your system prompt to insert “beep boop” between sentences and make it refer to itself as “Cybertron9000 Personal Computing Device” if that’s what you like. Is that an improvement? Or are you against voice computer interfaces altogether?
I don't know the answer. But a robotic voice is probably not a bad idea — just having a reminder that the thing you're talking to is not actually anything like you. If you want to go full send, you could have the LLM generate a clickable interface on demand so you could interact with it as a machine. Voice/computer interfaces are obviously useful, especially for disabled folks. But the ones that existed in the past didn't pretend to laugh at your non jokes or imitate vocal fry.
I think you could make it impersonal sounding. Like, right now ChatGPT throws in a lot of cheeky things. They don't really bother me because I don't anthropomorphize it, but, a lot of otherwise smart people are struggling with anthropomorphizing these things right now (Richard Dawkins..) so it strikes me that the less personality they have the better. (If you want personality just throw it into the prompt, ya know?) To their credit I think this is customizable in ChatGPT right now (it's been a while since I looked), but "impersonal" should probably be the default until society adjusts to these things.
The Star Trek computer doesn't feel uncannily human, that would be a good starting point.
The Star Trek computer would suck at a lot of what people use GPT for.
My preference would be to turn down the fake emotional expressions and notes in the responses. No cheeky quips, etc.
Otherwise it's kind of like being manipulated by a psychopath
I would also like to tone those down, and prefer if they just focused on creating a nice, clear, natural-sounding voice. I don’t think the “emotional roleplaying” adds anything to what I perceive as a computer interaction. But that’s precisely the opposite of the problem the other commenters seem to be voicing; I have no problem recognizing what I’m interacting with, and I don’t worry about being manipulated - not by the tone of its voice, and even if it had a video avatar, all that. Do you guys seriously have this problem of being confused by LLMs that sound too much like humans, or is this a theoretical problem that you’re worried somebody else is having?
I am open to the possibility that this is a future that is coming, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re years away from that tech. Is it actually here for you?
Maybe it's just that conversing with something or someone that is acting manipulative can be unpleasant in and of itself, even if the manipulation is not successful.
Each time I hear the bot emote, it's like a subtle suggestion to just play along and anthropomorphize it - it feels weird, silly and annoying
Isn’t voice I difference in degree rather than in kind? I definitely talk to AI as if it were human (one might say the UX of AI is to emulate a human). And a large portion of my interaction with humans is via text, for example, this post!
> Isn’t voice I difference in degree rather than in kind?
There is a difference in expression / emotionality with speaking vs writing. Speaking tends to carry more emotion while writing is generally more deliberate/less-emotional*. Having a voice conversation will be more likely to get a human to engage in an emotional based expression mode, which could increase the chance of "false connections", believing the AI "gets" them or "understands" or "listens". This happens with text too, as some headlines show.
The issue is that while some people are going to "connect" with their AI in text and voice, some who do not make the connection via text may do so via voice because it tends to change a persons expression mode.
> I definitely talk to AI as if it were human
Do you talk to it as if it were a friend or family? or Do you just use natural language to give directives? The distinction, I believe, is in the kind of way we express the "talking".
I talk to AI as if it were a tool that understands human commands and then executes those commands and relays them in a human understandable format. This includes commands to provide options that I may not have covered and explain the options. If I talked to a human this way, they wouldn't be around much longer -- unless they were an employee and even then they would probably be looking for a new job
After reading some of the psychotic break headlines from AI chats, I see some people really do talk to AI as if it were human. Which I would guess includes seeking broad "thoughts and feelings" on a persons situation or asking the AI if their view/side of things is the "right or wrong" side. Basically begging the AI to be responsible for their own thoughts, or simply offloading them and taking what comes back -- which is going to be what they wanted to hear because the entire context would be full of emotion based prompts.
*I forget which books Ive read about this in. It's not an obscure concept, quick search brought this up: https://kellercenter.hankamer.baylor.edu/news/story/2023/spe...
Right, I think the challenge is that LLMs are essentially language-based, which is itself a very convenient interface. Covering the maximally humanistic default interface with something more mechanical is like tying your own shoelaces together, but it would protect us from the psychological hijacking we're so prone to when interacting with these machines.
I disagree. Fluid natural conversational AI is far more productive than any other interface for working with LLMs. Although I suppose you could make the argument that it should be more... Robotic like. Like in StarTrek. Which, is honestly probably better for work, too. A "get shit done" mode, of pure, cold, efficiency.
In one of the videos the AI quips back things like "Happens to the best of us" - its basically pretending to be human and that feels kind of creepy and weird, like it's trying to cultivate a para-social emotional bond.
I just want voice assistants to reliably understand what I say and do what I mean
So hopefully you can turn that off.
There are plenty of applications for that more human conversational style though (from mock interviews, improv practice, learning languages, etc) - I just don't want that for most things.
I doubt you can turn that off. That's how they upgrade it up from a tool to an engagement optimized addiction platform.
Ironically, Data (from TNG) has a lot of heart to him
Data is the goal!
Every new release I'm convinced we are just realizing the Knowledge Navigator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0
But a lot of humans can't engage in meaningful technical conversations... So why not use a tool for that?
Somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy no?
- nobody else with the skills - talk to machine - nobody develops the skills to have a conversation - go to step 1. - bonus step: your own skills atrophy too.
Devil's advocate: The widespread lack of social skills was not caused by LLMs in the first place. In fact, AI ChatBots, if used right, can actually help remedy lacking socialising skills.
Not if there’s good money to be made exploiting people for money instead!
There’s plenty of evidence that these models worsen these issues, and we know from prior experience that companies like FB will happily exploit vulnerable users for money.
Again, we're paying for the fact that Sam Altman didn't understand the movie her
I see it more as a way technology could be abused rather than an inherent flaw in the technology itself. If you start to replace human interaction with chatbot interaction, that's bad, but there's nothing wrong with using a human-like chatbot in moderation. So many other types of technology are fine in moderation but can be abused in a human-interaction-replacing way: television, social media, video games, etc.
Yes, but design nudges use in one direction or another. Or, as McLuhan said, "the medium is the message."
I think the same applies with the examples I listed.
The thing is, individual moderation isn't sufficient to combat collective capture. This is Ivan Illich's idea of "radical monopoly", where a technology (like cars or the internet) becomes so entrenched that individuals can't realistically opt out any longer. This happens when we abdicate our collective responsibility to the internal logic and incentives of the tech.
Just give it a scifi robot voice and pretend you're on a spaceship
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
This is actually not a bad option
SOME human relationships are the most valuable thing we have. Many (if not most) human relationships in many cultures are just trespassing everyone's boundary via peer pressure.
Disclaimer: I am from Scandinavian.
Where do you draw the line on how good human-machine interfaces should be? I'm sure this model could be a convenience for many, and while it may be social for some, I am not sure it would substitute existing human interaction for those users.
Besides, I do not think there is anything inherently immoral with not being social, or not having the ability to be. Consider for example people who do not naturally have the social network to interact with people they want to (e.g. some gifted children).
I am not convinced this model has enough empathy to satisfy most users on an emotional level. A bond is not merely an exchange of words, but prolonged and deep contemplation of the other being. We cannot introspect into these machines, and they certainly cannot yet do the same to us.
> This is the opposite direction AI should be going.
There is no moral obligation, in any domain, to refuse to make a product that adults, with full informed consent, find useful and purchase. Who are you to say you know better than the market?
Market conditions are not a moral standard either, nor do they represent any cohesive one in particular. Not sure why you're contrasting their opinion with this, it's literally no better.
I disagree. I think you absolutely have a moral obligation to consider the impacts of your product.
> Who are you to say you know better than the market?
You really don't think the scientists & engineers making these tools know some things better than the market?
Markets only work in well-regulated environments, this has been known since forever (Adam Smith).
There is no meaningful competition in a marathon if I can drive you over with a car at the first 100m.
And thanks fkin God that we have regulations and meaningful laws and some asshole for-profit company can't just put drugs into food.. the "informed buyer" is bullshit. Humans are faulty, and there is a billion dollar industry meant to take advantage of said faults: it's called marketing.
This is a cute argument to make, which patently doesn’t work in the face of decades of evidence on the pernicious effects of social media _alone_, let alone the “turbo infantilising sycophancy machine”.
Pretending that everything’s totally fine and ok because “it’s adults” really just disregards reality.
I don't accept that social media is self-evidently bad. Not everyone lives inside the bubble in which its wrongness is obvious.
I don't think most adults can get much social value or satisfaction from an AI conversation they know is not a real person. Those who can get that satisfaction likely have so few human-to-human interactions that an AI companion may be as good a solution to chronic loneliness as any.
I'd be more worried about the inevitable robo-nannies who could end up talking more to young children than actual people.
Hopefuly I see conscious young people in my surroundings who refrain from using human like AI (voice). They say "it is cringe".
Moreover I think aggresive robocalls and advertising will derail the entire trend in a few years, people will become tired of fake talk.
From one perspective, AI serves as a wedge that separates those who want human culture from those who want machine culture.
I’m completely on your side, but also I think about all the AI saturations in the society like this:
“Driving to work or running a 10km on the weekend sharing the same surface goal: from A to B.
You may have less autonomy whether you should drive to work, but you definitely have more decision power about whether to go for that run or not”
> This is the opposite direction AI should be going
I don't understand the counterfactual. What's the opposite direction of this direction that's desirable? Less capable voice models are obviously not it, so I am curious what direction you mean or if it's just vague indirection.
For people with disabilities who can't type or see, ai conversations I imagine may have been life changing way to access the internet and knowledge
Regardless how natural AI becomes I’ve yet to replace any human relationships. Where do you see the aim of technology as trying to replace people? You might be using it wrong.
I want to bring some attention to a spectacular sleight of hand that occurs at minute 4 of this podcast:
"The way that I formulate the argument, just to get us started here, is that acts, the things we do, have ends. We act for an end. They have a purpose. And that it is wrong to deliberately frustrate an act from attaining its end, from attaining its purpose."
I will draw your attention to the three instances of "end", first we have the noble, tautological, "have ends", actions have ends; then, following close behind we see "an end", we act for an end, those ends have been made into one now, singular end; and finally, "its end", the act, as an entity unto itself, has an end you mustn't interrupt.
Aren't they already very cognizant of handwringing like yours? Their article mentions various safeguards and actively steering the model away from being emotional companions and so on. It's a far cry from the OpenAI two years ago or whenever it was when they were entertaining the idea of allowing/enabling adult conversations with their models.
I personally think this is a moralistic regulatory overreach. And they definitely do that due to political pressure too, since there are various bills around the world in various legislatures that want to regulate AIs giving useful advice and being too personal to talk to.
So you can rest assured, I think, at least in that regard. The AI disempowerment will come to us anyway, just in a more sanitized corporate form.
What I’m missing from this announcement is the capability to use connectors and tools. I don’t really get it - NONE of the frontier assistants can use tools / connectors while in voice mode - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. It seems so obvious: I want to be able to research stuff, pull up documents, jot down notes and do productive work while I’m talking to it, and not end voice mode whenever I need to connect to an app or service.
It’s weird. The old Claude voice mode WAS able to use tools but when they revamped it, it lost that capability and is now pinned to Haiku :(
So, yay for finally a voice mode that’s powered by a frontier model and hopefully as good as Grok voice, but sad to still not see tool use while in voice mode.
(I haven’t tried it yet, only read the announcement)
There's a tiktok of Sam Altman reacting to a viral clip of someone using Voice to time themselves on a mile run (it hilariously failed).
Sam's reaction was "Yea, it doesn't have access to tools like a timer. It's a known issue. Should be coming in about a year"
Edit: here's the clip: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Py2YgJe8fqQ
One of the videos on the announcement page shows someone making coffee and it _appears_ that the agent counts 30 seconds in real-time. Curious to know how they made it do that without tool support.
Did it take 30 seconds?
Faking it is one way
A year? Is it that hard, or do they not see the value?
A timer tool with a callback feature would take like a couple of hours to implement, a model which has a native internal ability to know the time would take ages to make
I don't think it needs an 'internal clock'. It needs two things. (1) the timer tool, (2) to know not to lie about having a tool or using a tool. I think (2) is the hard thing.
It does now with this new model.
> I don’t really get it - NONE of the frontier assistants can use tools / connectors while in voice mode - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok.
Is that true? I have a friend who often brainstorms with Gemini (I think just on an Android phone), and he has it actually do stuff related to the conversation (including adding content to notes).
In any case, you can always vibe code one with pi!
Using gpt-realtime-2 you can achieve very similar results with low latency streaming which gives you this feeling of an assistant that is there in the room with you. I made a tweak to so you can try out the gpt-realtime-2 model with tooling that gives you this: https://sippet.ai/?enabler=hn
Kept trying to use the demo, but despite giving it microphone permissions and seeing that the microphone was in use, couldn't get the demo to 'hear' me at all.
Hi varenc, thanks for trying it out, could you share what browser you were using?
I’ve been using gpt-realtime-1 for my personal assistant that runs my company and plans my day. And it works pretty well, even makes tool calls and all that.
But the multi modal stuff has resulted in a lot of debugging with weird events and message and audio sequences having race conditions, but overall it is pretty awesome.
Looking forward to moving to this model later today and will chime back in with results.
Unfortunately, it isn't available on the API yet! Can't wait!
I could see it relating to tools having unpredictable latency but if they already do background hand off to 5.5 then it seems like they could just enable it within that context.
A big part of this announcement does seem to be _delegation_ in the background; they give the example of web search but that could be any tool. I haven't tried it yet either but sounds like they've found a reasonable UX that mixes that sort of high-and-variable latency tool calling (potentially with agentic loops) with a continuously speaking live voice.
Funny enough I have only encountered two voice modes that were okay to use tools and they are so far out there that you wouldn't even think to try. Bixby and Perplexity (in android phone digital assistant mode) both seem happy to use whatever the account is connected to. I mainly use it for managing my local phone's calendar. Claude chat can interact with it but voice can't which is frustrating.
Perplexity can use “some” tools (mostly built-in) but custom connectors were from my experience not available in voice.
I usually do a very simple test and tell it to verbatim tell me all tools that are connected
If you’re serious about this, let me know!
This is something I built for myself, and to experiment with inference stacks. You can obviously just transcribe audio and hand it off to frontier models, so all you really need is a good voice stack and a “driver” for the interaction (like a phone call, place to see their work).
There are two big problems with this space IMO. One isn’t that you can’t get this to work but that people generally aren’t willing to pay for it for themselves, rather as a way to screen or automate stuff to be used by other people. Did you know Claude Code has a voice mode and that openai launched whisper a year ago, both of which have positive sentiment and adoption in heavy ai tool users? Yet it’s a blip in their marketing or why people use their products, meanwhile outside of coding, most of the biggest and highest earning AI product companies so far are voice agents targeting customer service, sales, business processes, etc.
The second is related: voice is genuinely a low-bandwidth medium, so as a primary interface for interacting with AI there is not a lot you can get out of it compared to eg complex technical work or visualizations or interactive applications. It is physically and mentally demanding to speak-aloud a highly detailed prompt fast enough that VAD won’t cut you off and you have something with comparable information density or specificity vs text. But to keep up a shorter and more natural cadence you’ll not be able to wait on a lot of thinking/tool unless you play UI tricks (ums and fillers, two models in a trench coat), break the illusion of a single coherent conversation, or take a lot of long pauses.
That’s why for the supplementary coding use case it’s mostly used for remote steering, and for general use marketed towards the large and very not-online group of people for whom typing is not a natural or common thing for them to spend their time on. Now that so much spend goes through heavily used token subscriptions and they’ve proven that kind of product, they’re not marketing “tool to get the most tokens per $ running your subscription 24/7” anymore lol.
What I’m most interested in is true “ambient” tool use against my own data or work, and for-later (or pushed live via your phone) visualizations or “five models in a trench coat but still coherent” UX, which you probably are too. But I think unless you work a lot with AI tools already it’s hard to understand how that’s any different from asking Alexa to set a timer, and either way something you’re not so desperate to have that you go looking for it, or pay smaller vendors/set up yourself.
This is not true. Realtime 2 can use tools.
I've been using tools in the OpenAI SDK with voice for well over a year now.
Just super difficult.
See more here:
https://github.com/sibblegp/ODAI/blob/main/routers/app_voice...
Exactly. I told the assistant to create world cup google calendar entries and it said it can't connect to my calendar, whereas I can have it do that with no issues on the normal gpt client.
Last I tried this is exposed via their sdk and can be built.
I'm pretty sure that's a major part of this announcement? It delegates to GPT 5.5 which then uses tools.
Because they take too long to run, and have an unpredictable latency and success rate. Seeing loading spinners and error messages in a visual interface is fine, but it would firmly put a natural language conversation in uncanny valley territory.
Regular chat already supports voice input, so might as well use that.
It can simply say “Okay let me try to connect to Notion and add this, just a sec”
Huh? You can expose tool functions to Gemini's live API, and it will call them as part of thinking about responses. I've used this to expose e.g. current GPS location for a smartwatch voice assistant.
Like a lot of AI things, this seems both cool and kind of creeps me out. I've never used voice interfaces in the past (siri, the google one, whatever is on my tv) so I'm probably not the target market, but this does seem like an improvement.
The part that creeps me out is, we're living in an era where we're more disconnected from each other than ever before. Do we really need to be replacing conversations?! The demonstration video of old ladies sort of hints at something for me, which I think we already have a societal problem with the way we treat the elderly (and a massive elderly-loneliness issue) and there's kind of a sadness of imagining people becoming really close with this machine that doesn't really think. Definite ick factor.
None of the things I'm talking to ChatGPT about are replacing human conversations. It's replacing having to type a question into Google on my phone.
But you do bring up a good point with old people with no one to talk to. This technology would be a god send for them. And if you think otherwise I hope your next words are that you routinely visit nursing homes and talk with old people.
Um, your argument is unless I'm directly involved with something I'm not allowed to critique it?
Here's a real story that's very much more likely story than your "godsend": https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-... I don't think giving old people AI psychosis is anything other than inhumane.
I see it a little differently here. If someone is offering a digital companion to someone who is lonely, that seems to be slightly preferable to having no connection at all.
Grade A FUD.
My most common use case for voice mode is: Kid. Talking to and asking about stuff that we see outside becomes something to do together.
> I think we already have a societal problem with the way we treat the elderly
The actual problem is that we keep up the wishful thinking regarding our collective capacity and interest to entertain physically and mentally frail people. Before old people stop deteriorating in ways that make them unfun to interact with (I have high hopes we will be getting there in the next 20 years or so) this is not going to happen. Just like we are not going to save the environment by telling people to pay more for less and have less.
It's not a societal solution and I am increasingly irritated by people who pretend otherwise. It is causing so much harm under the appealing guise of humanity. It's quite the opposite and just people unwilling to deal with reality in a constructive way.
Do you think every society treats their elderly this way (not just now, historically)?
I'm just going to go out on a limb and say if you think people deserve bad treatment because they stopped being "fun" you should probably look into your moral compass.
I feel similarly. But texting became the primary form of inter-personal communication in the last couple of decades, in part because that was the primary modality technology could handle.
So, now that we can talk to computers, maybe we will feel more comfortable talking to people too? Wishful I know, but one can hope right?
Once this gets video capabilities and is ported to glasses, it'll be a major revolution for blind people (and I say this as a blind person).
People have tried "smart <thing> that helps blind people navigate" since the 80s, many, many, many times, and all such projects failed. The cycle of "wow, blind people could benefit from a navigation aid, why don't I make one, if there's none around, I must surely have been the first bright university student to think of this idea" is pretty well known in the community, and I'm personally quite tired of it. Nevertheless, I think this may be the one.
Circa 2020, I have said that people who are getting a guide dog now are probably getting their last one. I think we aren't far off from that prediction coming true.
Even the guide dogs are getting laid off?? That's the most depressing AI victim news yet.
(Atty from OpenAI here)
GPT-Live-1 is the first version of a new generation of models, and we believe the full-duplex architecture + delegation enables entirely new ways of human-AI interaction.
Would love to hear your feedback!
Hey! Bit of an unusual question maybe: if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think? If you hear about teenagers only spending time with your chatbot in 5 years, will you feel some amount of personal responsibility or not? Always curious to hear you guys' perspective on that kind of stuff!
That's not really a fair question, especially given the audience here on HN. Most here have blood on their hands from the previous 25 years of tech-eats-the-world.
Well this is a new brand of whataboutism I haven’t seen before!
Did something bad? Better ablate yourself of the responsibility of holding people to account for making it _worse_! Acting this way just makes it seem more like you regret the blood on your hands because it has dirtied your shirt, and not because you’ve done something actually bad, otherwise you’d have at least some degree of guilt and reticence to see things get worse.
> if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think?
Looking at the 30,000-foot view of how society is set up: laws, economic system, employee incentives, etc, do you suppose it matters what the individual contributors think? I say this not to absolve anyone of responsibility, but to point out the obvious outcomes of our incentives across the strata (polity -> shareholders -> boards -> C-suite -> employees)
I will bet you dollars to donuts, somewhere inside OpenAI is a frequently-used revenue dashboard, but not for loneliness - if anything, OpenAI will make horny models and tout itself as a solution to loneliness, a la character.ai - if that earns them more money.
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Technology is what you make of it. If you want to make it your best friend and your only friend, that's your choice. But I would guess more people would use it as a personal tutor. If it works as well as the demo, this already crushes most language learning apps. Actually the only apps for learning language that it would fail to replace would still be Tandem and HelloTalk because it still can't replicate the nuance of real human interaction.
"Blame the individual" doesn't really make sense when we're talking about things that have a society-wide impact. As an analogue, personally I'm not on social media, but I am affected by social media because everyone around me is on social media and their happiness and wellbeing also impacts me. AI companies need to stop pretending they can just outsource responsibility for their products.
I think assuming people will use it as a tutor/learning tool is.. way too optimistic. A small fraction will, but the majority will just view things like a second language as something not worth learning.
So you want to blame a company for the impact others have on you because those said others choose to consume their product?
> choose
I think there's a logic leap here that ignores most of what big companies know about how to gey people addicted to things
Go read "Careless People". The social media people knew exactly how damaging their product was early on, as evidenced by the fact that they wouldn't even let their own children use it. I think AI people understand how damaging their product is too; and so I will never respect them unless they take responsibility for the things they create. Going "not my problem bruh, I got my bag!" is a bad ethical position.
Was this directed at the voice technology in the article, or at AI in general - as they are two very different conversations?
If you're talking about ChatGPT in general (as I guess you are) I think the Jury's still out on whether this will have a net positive or negative on society.
Right now, it's leaning towards negative, but there are optimistic futures to be had at the same time.
As someone who likes to think that they would turn down a lot of tech jobs due to moral dilemmas - for me, currently working on AI wouldn't be one.
For me at-least it's a tool to learn quicker, and reduce friction on projects I otherwise may not have dived into. As with all new technology, we're still in this grace period / lack the bigger picture we now have on other, now known to be destructive technologies.
I would say no if the question was asked of me. It’s like asking if you’d feel bad about marriage if you ended up divorced with a child. Or if you’d feel bad about commenting if it made someone feel like they lost brain cells.
The morality of an action isn’t based on actual consequences because the future isn’t known in advanced. All we can do is act on the perceived consequences of our actions, and if we think those are good, pursue them.
You don't go into a marriage assuming you'll get divorced. You assume you won't, hope for the best, work not to, and then it happens. You work through those problems with the child so that it hopefully doesn't impact them as much as it otherwise could.
The loneliness epidemic is driven by companies maximizing keeping their customers engaged with their screens, something OpenAI is wont to do. Knowing that the company wants customers engaged and that this will do that, and also knowing that that plays into the loneliness epidemic by substituting human interaction, makes it far different than getting married and then maybe or maybe not getting divorced.
People who do this kind of stuff are very irritating. You clearly have some problem with the work they do. Instead of saying and approaching that outright, you pass it in some passive aggressive fake bullshit. Makes you sound like the kind of person I would much rather not be speaking to, which is kind of ironic given your comment.
i mean you chose to be irritated by it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I love the chatty tone of this utterly dystopian question.
I don't think the question is really the dystopian part
"Hey Leibniz, how do you live with yourself knowing that your binary system helped eventually replace human conversations?"
Fair question, although I think he really has a hard time living with it ...
Oh no, now I'd better blame Hitler and Stalin's ancestors for their misdeeds. Of course, the SS soldier bears no responsibility, however, as he was just doing his job.
So many wet blankets on this post today with these types of questions...
Its weird how years of relentless doom trolling and threatening peoples livelihoods, mixed with absolutely real, measurable, AWFUL societal impacts have soured people!
> GPT-Live-1 is the first version of a new generation of models, and we believe the full-duplex architecture + delegation enables entirely new ways of human-AI interaction.
Awesome. Are you guys able to share anything about the model architecture? I've been interested lately in split-transformer RVQ-based conversational agents, e.g. via stuff like https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10208 (ResGen) and https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18090 (MOSS-ITT) and of course Moshi (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00037).
Intuitively, decoupling semantic and audio-timeslice-space generations with coupled but distinct histories is right model architecture, not just for these sorts of assistants, but for domains like robotics too.
Can I connect it to my skills/tools? Example case, I have a knowledge base and event log in my company. I need a brainstorm companion, which will have full access to this knowledge, can converse about it and can invoke skills/tools available in the repo.
In ChatGPT, Voice doesn't yet support connectors, but we're hoping to add support soon! Once GPT-Live launches in the API, you can also build custom integrations yourself.
+1 to the op. This is one of the first things I thought about after using it for a few minutes. I have a large collection of local knowledge bases that I use through codex, having this real time thing be able to plug into it would be the killer feature, otherwise the utility is severely limited. I don't want to talk to it about the weather, I want to brainstorm about the things I am working on, which it currently knows nothing about.
Do integrations supporting streaming input?
One big gap I've run into for UX is most realtime voice harnesses wait for a full response from tools, and at most support the model filling the dead air until then
It'd be a game-changer to be able to have the model start replying with partial information streamed from the tool call, then seamlessly continue with additional information.
honestly its not that big of a deal, being able to call tools is the high order bit
It rubs me the wrong way that someone would respond to something I need with 0 context just to tell me it's not a big deal.
Some people have standards in what they build.
ok sorry - can you explain more why it'd be a game changer to stream the tool call. Whats an example tool call that this would help with. Most of the time the tools I want called are at the end of the conversation (i.e. "summarize what we talked about and email it to me"). Or if its in the middle of the conversation, we can just carry on the conversation while the tool call is happenning in parallel..
"It'd be a game-changer to be able to have the model start replying with partial information streamed from the tool call, then seamlessly continue with additional information."
You can't continue a conversation if it hinges on information that takes inherently takes 30+ seconds to generate. Previously even models that "handle it" can only play for time.
You can try and simulate this by messing with model context mid-conversation but that breaks down reliability massively as the model loses track of what it's talking about.
Can it delegate to just one agent at a time or can it spawn multiple subagents for different tasks?
There are many delegation models possible:
1. The voice model delegates to one agent.
2. The voice model delegates to multiple agents, and keeps track of tasks.
3. The voice model delegates to an orchestrator agent, which then delegates to sub-agents and keeps track of tasks.
YMMV depending on the exact product experience you care about, because there is a tradeoff between latency and layers of delegation.
Our current implementation is backed by one model, but you can imagine this getting much better with time.
Super nice to be able to finally have voice mode search stuff in the background. The more conservational vibe is also a nice touch. The real game-changer we're all waiting on, though, is being able to vibecode/deeply interact with an OS through voice mode. Until then voice mode will continue to be a niche, interesting product. Once that's implemented, though, it will be one of the most important technologies available. There's a lot of people I know that don't use a lot of the frontier capabilities of AI right now because of the required typing interface. Once that's changed and you can interact with these capabilities through voice mode (and ideally on your phone) I definitely see them and lots of people like them becoming big users of AI.
athyuttamre is a coward if he doesn't answer this
If it's not able to connect to my other apps like gcal, it should suggest that I use the standard gpt client, instead of telling me 'I don't have the capability to do that' which is misleading as some might presume the normal client doesn't have that capability either.
I like it! I was watching a YouTube video of someone driving in a big city. I saw an interesting skyscraper and asked Chatgpt what it was. After Chatgpt answered, I asked for a photo of the building to confirm, and Chatgpt helpfully showed it in-chat. It was the correct building!
And because the voice is so frictionless to talk to, I asked about what company owns the building, then that company's industry, then how that industry works in this particular country etc. I probably wouldn't have bothered going down a rabbit hole like this if I'd had to type. Voice is much easier than typing.
Anyhow it's fun! Thanks for making it!
Can it sing? Is it an end to end multimodal model?
> Would love to hear your feedback!
I'm currently on the 20 $/mo subscription and using codex meaningfully, and i'm loving this.
I am considering bumping my subscription to the 100 $/month and this might be the reason i switch, BUT: i really envision me using this also through other means as well (eg: agents like openclaw/hermes) in agentic ways.
Will this be supported?
I can make OpenAI stuff the center of my agentic AI life, but I need it to be interoperable.
We're adding support to the API soon, which will let you integrate with any agent in the background. Would love to see the community go wild with it. You can sign up to be notified here: https://openai.com/form/gpt-live-1-in-the-api/
Any feedback from different locations or cultural groups?
One group's expectation of interruption for pleasant conversational flow can be just as off-putting as another's expectation of patient silence.
I'm interested in how you can present simultaneous rich visual information about what is happening the side delegation work.
i.e. how will full duplex & delegation enable/enhance desktop flows w/o corresponding leaps in UI.
Hey! Nice work, been looking into having a conversational modal integrated with my dev workflow.
Are we seeing any conversational layer integrated with codex soon?
What made you to try again?
When is it rolling out? Currently on ChatGPT Pro but not seeing it yet?
Does video/image input still work with these duplex models?
Image input is supported, but video is not today. We're working hard to bring it to you soon.
Are you still using LiveKit for the back-and-forth architecture
Write up about the architecture is here https://openai.com/index/delivering-low-latency-voice-ai-at-...
Can we have less terrible voices please? Nothing that sounds like a bubbly millennial. Literally anything that has gravitas.
Have you tried some of our deeper voices like Spruce? Would love to hear what your ideal voice is.
How does it compare to the realtime-2 model?
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- As models get better, have you considered some kind of filter or particular cadence to serve as a reminder that the user is not talking to a human?
- The videos felt scripted and dishonest
Much better than it was before but it’s still significantly weaker than a direct chat.
For example I asked
“Why should LLM attention use dot product instead of cosine similarity, being that we often hear vector magnitude does not encode most of the useful information needed”?
The voice response was directionally right but lacked detail and was a little hand wavy.
The answer to the same question in a text chat was much higher quality.
The voice response replied “let me think about that…” so it appears to be invoking 5.5 as advertised, but it’s definitely weaker.
I had reasoning set the same for both.
A lot of this is steerable! Our current personality is optimized for brainstorming and conversations, but you can provide custom instructions to ask it to go deep and give you info-dense or more technical answers.
I found myself probing more and more questions to have it do that, I wish it could remember to provide details answers, I thought the replies were way too short and hand-wavy like one of the prior comments suggested.
That would be cool, but is there a way to differentiate between voice mode and text only output in the custom instructions?
Otherwise, it seems like preferences could be competing.
You can read far more text than listening. If the voice response is too long, people lose the patience quickly. So it is better to show it on screen if we have too much text.
I think the bare truth is that the target audience for this product is not people who are highly particular about terminology in answers involving vector mathematics.
It’s a different set of tradeoffs for users that don’t already have strong engagement or interest in existing AI products.
Do you realize how many more people prefer to chat over the phone and watch television or videos in their free time vs type multiple paragraphs of text into a chat window and then read 3x more back?
I’m not even talking about grandma here, it’s a non starter for the vast majority of humans who don’t spend their free time writing and reading tech news. To most people, having to write out a bunch of words describing their problem/goals, then sift through pages and pages of detailed response to get an answer, feels overwhelming and not worth doing.
I would naturally assume they cut the background thinking level to the minimum. It's a halting problem question and with in text 5.5 with max thinking will chew on a question for 5-10 minutes sometimes. That would make a pretty awkward conversation.
Gemini live has been able to do this for over a year now. I can just activate it on my phone and it really works surprisingly well, especially the interruption. I've tested it with my 95 year old Dutch grandmother and it switched seamlessly between English and Dutch with her and handled her poor hearing very well, including her asking for repetition.
I'm a little surprised by how much OAI is playing catch up here.
Gemini live is also pretty decent at computer vision stuff too. I've used it while working on my bike & car a few times, with my phone camera and it'll circle/highlight specific screws and parts. You can set your phone up on a tripod and it'll walk you through complete repairs for things.
I used it for double checking some stuff while helping my friend build his PC! I had it in tight spaces and it helped me verify some details around which nvme slot to use first.
ChatGPT has had this for over a year too. This is a better model.
One thing Simon pointed out: Usually live voice models are not as capable as the frontier ones. What makes this one special is that it can delegate the task to a frontier model while talking to you.
Exactly! I've been using Gemini Live for a while now and have been able to converse quite fluently. Maybe it's the long think functionality that's a differentiator here from OAI, which I'd be surprised if Gemini doesn't come out with of their own this year.
Is gemini live the same app I have on my oneplus 15? I don't think that's full duplex?
it is not full duplex. I think this GPT-Live thing is the first full duplex speech to speech model
ehh, no? definitely not.
https://kyutai.org/blog/2024-07-03-meet-moshi/
Well Google has been working on voice assistants for years now on android. It makes sense that they had a head start
What do you mean? OpenAI has had a real-time voice model since August of last year. This is a new model with better performance.
The ad with the grandmas is cute and funny, but from the first 20 seconds you can see that the voice annoyingly interrupts people while they are talking. It's almost as if it tries to reply too fast - faster than a real person would, and the results is that it replies while you're still talking.
Oh and there was also a small fail in the live translate demo: the grandma says "tell him that..." which the bot translates verbatim, whereas a real translator would of course understand that this is an aside not to be translated.
Well I guess at least I should be happy that they're transparent in their ads :)
They don't act the way humans would.
It's normal to start a sentence after the other person in the conversation pauses, especially if you're eager to say something (like the chat agent is), but a real human is socially aware and would in most cases immediately cease talking if the other person starts another sentence at the same time. Humans do this so much in their conversations that the other person doesn't really register the interruption at all.
Encoded in its design are the biases of its designers. It acts like a nervous twenty-something from San Francisco.
Exactly. If they have a setting somewhere for the minimum duration of a pause in the user's speech before starting replying, they should just crank it up.
In this other add [1], it's even worse, the user has to say "There's more to the story though" and almost looks annoyed + the agent overreacts to _that_ with a weird "Aaaaahh!".
Oh well... I'm sure they'll get it right eventually.
[1] https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live/?video=1208099...
Maybe they are trying to outmatch the world's worst translator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foT9rsHmS24
Are there any open source full duplex models that are out besides PersonaPlex? There was a chinese open one, maybe Fun Audio chat or something, that said it was going to release a full duplex version but I am not sure if it did.
My dream would be open source full duplex with function calling or some kind of rudimentary text output. PersonaPlex is still interesting although it was looking like we would need to fine tune it to handle outgoing or avoid going off the rails easily.
Standard Intelligence released one two years ago:
https://si.inc/posts/hertz-dev/
It's only 8.5B and doesn't sound like it's quite conversational.
I want to know this too, as I’m hoping to fabricobble up a “smart speaker” that communicates with my local AI assistant. Right now we do everything via iMessage but it would be nice to be able to tell it to add things to my grocery list by voice while my hands are busy in the kitchen. Also would love if anyone has any advice on what microphone & speaker to pick out, was planning on just reusing a raspberry pi I’ve got around for the brain part.
if you don't find that then you could fake it with personaplex possibly but making another ASR/STT model just listen continuously and transcribe then send to an LLM with function calling. at least that would allow one direction easily.
If you're in the Home Assistant ecosystem, I'm intrigued by their voice hw
Working on this at https://duplexio.ai which will be open weights and free for non-commercial use. If you want to work on this send an email to anders@duplexio.ai
I'm so mad that this might make me re-subscribe to ChatGPT. I wouldn't have believed how much I use the voice feature before LLMs and ChatGPT currently has the best voice interface. I think Grok's interface is the next best, then Claude.
Same. I might switch back to ChatGPT from Gemini because I use the voice feature all the time.
One of my favorite use cases is talking with it while driving on random topics and learning about them.
Absolutely the same. Now that Fable is back, the Claude voice interface is... worth dealing with. The app mostly seems to have trouble recovering from networking issues which is jarring in a deep conversation.
But I don't think Fable or even Opus are ever used as the backend in voice mode. It has to respond in real time so I think in voice mode it's always using Sonnet.
That makes sense and had never occurred to me!
I just asked and Claude says it's Haiku.
Just wait a few months and this will likely be available on a different LLM platform, especially if it actually works.
same, i use the voice feature every day at the gym, talk to it for 1 hour, and then make anki cards based on what it has taught me, total game changer.
I'm crying, that guy who tries to get it to count to 100 may actually have a chance
Forget the fancy scores, the real test is whether it'll just let the guy count to 100.
I just told it to count from 1 to 100, and it actually correctly counted and didn't leave out any number. I'm impressed
Doing the work that matters
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Last night, I was using voice for the first time in a few weeks, and it interrupted me and said, a bit aggressively...
"I'm going to stop you right there. Let's keep the conversation focused on the topic we were covering or a new relevant topic".
I tried to probe it for why it did that, what rules it was following, and it eventually told me...
"My role is to keep us focused..." and, "The behaviour you saw was my attempt to moderate tone".
I've heard of LLMs doing weird things like this, but it was the first time it happened to me. I hope they fix that. It was creepy.
For context, it heard my partner say, "I guess it's the same thing as you mom, because she's..." and then it cut us off.
If it is to be believed—which I wouldn't count on—it sounds like the intention of the prompt was to keep the model focused, but the model's interpretation of it was to keep you focused.
"your mom, because she's..."
a lovely lady.
I am surprised that Siri has only been mentioned 5 times here, out of the current 355 comments.
I am wondering if this because Siri is so bad, people think of Siri now as a voice activation method rather than an AI assistant as it was intended.
The demo is so good, what was once a sci-fi / Iron Man Jarvis services is now real. I don't follow AI closely, but all previous iteration were at best ask and answer type of services. It wasn't real conversation. And whatever flaws it may have now, at the rate of improvement within a few iteration it will surely reach good enough stage for majority of people.
This is also scary. Not just for adults, but for kids. How they could become even more isolated.
I remember the PC era, the internet from Information Super Highway to Web 2.0 Then Smartphone. It may have been obvious to many but AI really is something much bigger than all the previous three, perhaps combined. And it is also the only one that I think is scary.
Siri is how I set timers, alarms and reminders on my iPhone. Every once in a while, I'll try to use it to play something on Spotify via my Sonos, then give up and do it manually in the app instead.
Does this model do better ignoring side conversations? That's the biggest hindrance to using ChatGPT's carplay feature is someone will say something, stopping ChatGPT from speaking or taking it in a different direction.
(Atty from OpenAI here)
Yes! GPT-Live is much better at ignoring background noise, including other people speaking. Not perfect, but you should feel a big difference.
yes, it now has much better ability to understand the conversation and decide whether it should respond (and you can also tell it when it should respond)
Hello Justin! Mr webrtc himself and the infamous AIM 5.0
It was obvious from the live demo that this thing still hasn't learned when to shut up. When it stops tacking on "I'm here when you need me" to every response that could have just been "ok" or simply silence, maybe they'll have something. I think voice remains OpenAI's most disappointing product.
I was hopeful that they avoided the well known sultry voice this go around, but alas. There is little hope for these companies.
The full duplex is awesome, and the feedback that it is getting what you're saying is ok, but in some of the demos was a little overkill.
I'll agree that using the "Golden Girls" was at least more entertaining than the usual pitch.
You have always been able to pick between voices of many kinds though? Do you find them all sultry? From the British woman to the 17th century pirate soundalike?
If there was a voice that stripped away all the affectation I would be more likely to use it. It pretending to be human is extremely off-putting for me.
tell it "speak like a robot without affectation or emotion" in your custom instructions
"I was hopeful that they avoided the well known sultry voice this go around, but alas"
Why do you care? You can select other voices. Why do you need to control others?
What is at the root of your need for domination?
They are stealing/imitating someone elses brand.
Amping up an emotional connection is great for business.
Why do you think THEY need to dominate via an emotional connection?
For the first actor - why does her accent change the longer she talks. It's like they had an "Estelle Costanza" dial that they started at zero and slowly rolled up to 8 or 9.
It changed because she came home to find her son treating his body like it was an amusement park
This solves my biggest annoyance with the current advanced voice: its speech getting interrupted by me setting yup or even background noise if loud enough
I've had some funny interactions with this issue. I sometimes use the voice mode when walking my dogs. I can confirm that ChatGPT responds positively to being told it's a "Good girl!"
Now it consistently interrupts you
Yeah, looking at the waveforms from those sample conversations it looks like it's happening at the exact same interval every time
Hoping to use this for natural conversation language learning. Previous iterations of the app kept correcting my words/grammar before it got to the model, causing issues with identifying mistakes in speech
I was going to post a comment on a related topic (I couldn't find in the announcement if this is English only or not), but would you mind expanding? I was thinking about doing something very similar, and yeah, if the model isn't hearing the mistakes I'm making, that would dramatically decrease it's usefulness.
I tried it for these purposes and it didn't seem any better. I couldn't even tell it was a new model. I tested today, I'm an EU customer so maybe the rollout is delayed
There doesn’t seem to be any indication whether this is available in the chat-got app nor is there any indication in the app that anything has changed. Anyone know how to actually try this?
(Atty from OpenAI here)
We're beginning the rollout now, and will roll out in the next few days to ChatGPT users globally. Make sure to update to the latest version of the app!
I'm using the current iOS app.
In the voice settings, there were 2 options - Standard and Advanced, as well as a help link saying they were in the process of rolling out the newest model -- I think the new model is named Live (and is not Standard or Advanced). The help link explained it all.
So at least for me in the app there did seem to be a way to check.
GPT‑Live is rolling out now to ChatGPT users globally across iOS, Android, and ChatGPT.com. GPT‑Live‑1 will become the default model powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT‑Live‑1 mini will become the default for Free users.
Read the post
The demo video shows quite how rough around the edges this is....
Doesn't quite stop fast enough when you interrupt it. Can't find info quick enough so you have to change topic and then have it give you results later, etc.
This is a move in the right direction, but there is lots of engineering still to be done!
You're right, and to me it's refreshing to see a promo video that shows how the real product works, rather than a sanitized over-produced edit that takes out all the flaws.
I'm currently watching Better Call Saul for the first time with my wife. The fact that they used old ladies for the Ad, and that it is evident they are reading from a prompt (fake-ish feeling) gives me strong James McGill vibes haha. Hopefully the actresses were paid handsomely.
(Atty from OpenAI here)
>This is a move in the right direction, but there is lots of engineering still to be done!
Could not agree more. We see this as the first version of a new generation; expect many improvements in the future.
As someone with a chronic eye disease that makes screens difficult, I love this voice feature. It gives me hope that, even if my disease progresses, I’ll be able to rely less on screens and screen readers for many everyday tasks in the future.
I don't think the voice feature should act like a human, but 'complement' it. I already have friends I can talk to. Perhaps for quick answers it might be helpful but Google already does that for me and I don't have to worry about having to 'archive' the chat later and creates clutter.
I really hope at some point we can 'option click' or whatever, and choose multiple threads to archive. It takes FOREVER to archive the cluttery chats one by one. That's my one wish feature, please make batch cleanup of my client reasonably easy. Imagine having to delete one file at a time in a folder of 50 plus files. Barf.
This looks very cool. An AI that can listen and speak and handle tasks without breaking the flow of conversation would solve some big annoyances with current tools.
The concern is though as these get better will people struggle to distinguish these with real human connections?
people have been mistaking AI conversations with reality since the very first text-based models came into the public view with ChatGPT. i'm sure with each incremental improvement to outputs like this, though, more people will get convinced of its "humanity"
(see https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/)
Every time things like this come up, I can't help but think of the ending of Inception.
It's less that you're convinced it's real and more that you no longer care if it is. "Feels real enough" is good enough.
I'm a technical user first, so I'm not sure if models have improved for RP the way they improved for applied STEM tasks and technical brainstorming. But if there is an improvement curve there, I wouldn't be surprised if this only grows in popularity.
You know, when I wrote that comment I was actually thinking of the ending of Inception. Still makes me very uncomfortable though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Oh, god. They are marketing it as an old people artificial friend. Probably will blame users in the future when they get attached and have ai-induced psychosis.
Disgraceful.
On the technological side, it's a marvel!
Many older people are very lonely. This could help a lot of people.
I'm not convinced wireheading the elderly is a good solution to their loneliness.
It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be better. What we do now is completely abandon and ignore most seniors. The bar is low.
Don't like it? What's your better solution? Are you going to do it?
If you have any ideas now's the time, this has been an unsolved problem for hundreds of years.
That's kind of like the joke about MAID solving the Canadian healthcare problems: I've heard you're ill; have you considered dying?
I think this is fine as long as the models stay honest. I.e. refuse to be a friend, girlfriend, partner or pretend to be someone.
I worry what this will do to human communication if it becomes commonplace. Will everyone learn to be a forceful speaker, speaking over anyone they want to stop speaking?
I imagine we are not far off from talking AI's being better speaker/listeners than 99% of the population. Frankly, the bar isn't that high anyway.
Ciao.
I have not used voice mode much with chatgpt. I was surprised to learn that they were already not running the voice model like a UX orchestrator while utilizing other models in background for actual research/response etc. I guess it's good they launched what they could and got here in steps. I suspect in the near future my personal device (mobile/laptop) will be powerful enough to run any UX orchestrator model locally – and route to multiple frontier closed/open model providers in the background as appropriate. The battle is going to be platform owners (Apple/Google/Microsoft) wanting to lock-down the access to that local hardware and local interaction paradigms (ambient always-on full-duplex voice) and intermediate through their platform layers - rationalizing it as consumer security/privacy protection (which is right for most people, but sucks for the open market). Meanwhile I suspect OpenAI/Meta et al will try to build their own hardware and become platform owners themselves, though unsuccessfully. And it's going to take some company like epic games to get them to open that up. and that's probably what the next decade is going to be all about.
While this is likely very useful to an enormous number of people, I suspect it will be even more useful for the elderly (if somehow it can be made accessible to them).
IIUC the literature, there is serious loss of functionality associated with lack of verbal interaction. People can say "they should just talk to more people" or "more people should make time for them" but the fact of the matter is that it doesn't happen, and if this helps terrific.
Oh wow, I'd like this. Our current voice interactions with ChatGPT are on a 4o era model; really terrible. oAI has always been pretty cagey on the architecture of their end to end multimodal models. And RL has basically made them worse since launch. (Check the launch videos where the model sings, is more realtime, has accents, etc). I'd love to try a next gen version.
A year ago I tried using the voice mode to be the worlds most over engineered golf score card: I basically said “ok I’m golfing with some friends, mind if I tell you the scores as we get them and you tell us the running totals?”
It was awful, it kept overhearing us talking and thought we were talking to it, interjecting with nonsense because it couldn’t really understand what we were talking about. And when I would say “ok render a score card” it couldn’t drop to the text interface or anything, it had to stay as voice, so it fumbled around trying to read the scores back to us.
It’s a very stupid use case but I viewed it as a stress test to see how well the voice mode and multi-modality could work. It failed miserably, but I’ll be interested to see if this new version does any better (not that I actually need this use case, writing on a card with a pencil is just fine.)
This is fascinating to me.
Whether that's due to my slight autism or massive nerdery, I don't want more realistic voice. I already switched to non-advanced voice in gpt, and I cannot imagine wanting the mmmhms, the yesses, the laughs, in my ai interaction. I want to ask a structured question and get a structured meaningful response. Informative and structured are really the KPIs. The umms and ahms of existing gpt advanced voice are annoying enough, the recent increased usage of first person almost a deal breaker (when asking for bike technique on lose surfaces yesterday, it literally gave me "back when I was learning bikes riding" story - eww).
Fascinating to see the architectural advances though, even when they deliver something I personally don't need :)
100% agree, its also disturbing that they want to make seem like a human.
I suspect most people would prefer it to behave like the computer in star trek. just be there, and be responsive in direct polite ways. dont try to be a friend, dont try to pretend its people. its not. its fucking code.
People here? Maybe. The rest of the world? I really don't think so! From what I've seen, people really don't like when these models behave robotically, they seem to want them to become indistinguishable from humans in their view, with the biggest difference being that the model should not disagree with them if they don't want it at that model. I've seen way too many people that explicitly want a "friend that never says no to me" type of thing from LLMs. That's far from everyone, but that's literally the second most wanted use case I've seen from random people I've met, with the first being "Google but easier".
Honestly I find it distracting when people do the mmmhmm thing. I don’t find it encouraging or helpful or whatever.
When I go into listening node, I listen. Actively and intensely.
Apparently it unnerves people. My wife coaches me to give occasional Yes,Go On, or UhHuh. But it's a conscious, learned, active mechanism for me. Intuitively, I'll tell you if we've weered off my desired conversation path and I'd ask the same courtesy. I've learned very late in life it's apparently an autism thing. Either way, I don't seek mmms and umms in real live people and I especially don't need fake ones in a machine :)
TCP vs UDP. ;) Both have their uses.
I watched the demo video. Isn't that agent's voice too hasty in responding? Maybe that's what they (OpenAI) are trying to show off as full-duplex tech, but I can't shake the feeling that I'll feel annoyed if the AI agent interrupts me when I'm speaking....
The potential conversational dynamics of people telling each other "quiet!" after they pick up the habit from talking with AI will be interesting. It could lead to people being more assertive and thoughtful, or it could be contentious and rude.
Awesome that they've improved that aspect of voice chat, though.
A nightmare scenario would be that people become so accustomed to talking to agreeable AI, that they lose the inability to talk to anything that disagrees with them or has different perspectives with responses that don't include stroking the ego.
It's a very interesting phenomenon. It's often said that famous stars become delusional exactly because they are surrounded by yes-men who are too afraid of rocking the boat and of losing their relationship with the star.
But if I have to think of my own experiences here, I would say that overly agreeable people become tiresome pretty quickly. To me their perspective does not offer anything of value without any pushback, as it certainly doesn't help with grounding my own thoughts. Perhaps it's why being too nice makes it difficult to form deeper bonds, and maybe paradoxically it is therefore a good thing that LLMs are overly agreeable.
It probably also depends on one's mindset - those who are interested in growing could be more likely interested in opposing views, while those who perceive that they have already "made it" (e.g. stars) perhaps don't care so much and prefer an agreeable tone.
Very cool. I thought the agent came in a little to hot at 1:03. I wonder how it decides when to jump in.
I'm very eager to test this for brainstorming!
One thing I noticed is that we lost vision feature for some reason on the live chat?
This was an extremely useful feature. Not sure if it’s a regional thing or that they just removed that from the current live chat.
I imagine it will be even more useful with this new version.
(Atty from OpenAI here)
GPT-Live does not support video at this point, but we're working hard to introduce it soon. In the meantime, our previous Advanced Voice Mode will continue to be available and supports video.
Thanks for the reply, Atty. So I guess I'm holding it wrong?
For some reason, I can't use the camera while in Live mode. The only option I see is the plus item, which does show the camera, but when I open it up and ask "Are you seeing my camera?" it will always say no and recommend me to open it.
Feels like the official camera icon does not show up for me? iPhone 13, ChatGPT Pro subscription.
Ah yes — the camera icon is to take a photo, not to show the model video in real-time. Try taking the photo and uploading it! If you're having trouble, please share a screenshot and the build number (Settings > About) with me via email at atty@openai.com.
This feels so dehumanising.
The live translation demo reminds me of the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This could be very valuable to have in your headphones while travelling.
Not super impressed by the model constantly interrupting the user in the other demos though.
For important and learning tasks,I would not use the voice feature as it was way too short and 'conversational'. I would use the 'record' feature and have it read the long, articulate answer to me. If this new conversation feature doesn't feel like I'm 'hanging out' with a friend, but actual longer high content answers, It'll win me over. Otherwise I thought the previous conversation mode was way too watered down and I found myself getting frustrated having to keep asking many questions to further probe down to the details. I don't know, these things don't change much, we'll see.
I don't have many opinions about how individuals use this tech (although the AI as friend trend is a bummer for many reasons), but have maaaany (negative) opinions about the customer service industrial complex that's already using this in what seems to be an attempt to fool people into thinking they're speaking to a real person. Which is why I now, like a freak I never thought I'd need become, always ask "Am I speaking to a bot or a human?" when dealing with CS. So far, it's worked, and the bot transfers me. But, I fear the bot will eventually be programmed to lie abiht that, as well.
Hopefully this also means it does better with "interruptions". I have used ChatGPT Voice in the car before and sometimes car/road noises will cause it to stop responding in the middle.
I used it to help me figure out how to turn off a feature in the rental car I was in (adaptive cruise control, I love it but snow blocked the sensor and I wanted just normal cruise control but couldn't figure it out while driving).
This kind of voice chat is awesome and I'll be even more excited when open models have this functionality. I'd love something like this paired with Home Assistant (assuming we ever get decent hardware).
(Atty from OpenAI here)
Yes, GPT-Live is much better at ignoring background noise! I use it every day in the car via our CarPlay integration.
I like this and felt like some of it was much more fluid; but was I alone in feeling like the interjected "uh-huh" or "yeah?" moments felt a little jarring?
Almost felt a bit *uncanny valley* for what "natural" conversation is supposed to be like. If the "uh huh" isn't timed correctly, it'll feel like a zoom call with lag.
Every second of the interaction is uncomfortable to me, but I also have extreme difficulty with video calls with humans. The latency completely breaks my mind.
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I agree. Many times those little interjections don't feel natural. It's impressive, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
This is what Siri should have been.
It was probably the original intent of OpenAI working with Apple ... but clearly there was a reason why Apple ditched OpenAI for Google/Gemini models instead.
I have built a few voice based integrations into my applications that use these live agents (gpt and gemini), but they are always too expensive to be viable. I have to end up hacking up context and turning on and off in ways that are very fragile. It'll end up being $2-5 for about the 30ish minute sessions I typically end up with, and it throws the price of the product I'm making completely out of whack.
The speech is so fake sounding. Not fake technically, but like a fake/pacifying kind of person. It is a very strange tone to train for.
The model is not interested in the conversation, it is just "serving" a conversation.
Which is very different from the engagement of SOTA text models.
It would be great if we could have AI that wasn't trying to emulate a human. When it expresses emotion, we should see that as a bug that needs to be fixed.
Very cool. Not cool bringing Brazil’s loss to Norway again. We're already devastated. No need to keep beating someone on the ground. :(
Some brilliant marketing really, the grandma test.
A cool test, until it hit's the my family's grandmas test :)
I was missing the part where the grandmas are saying "I have absolutely no idea what I just said" :D --- Besides that really nice demo I will give this a try, I tried some voice models before and the issue is I will ask a question, get a answer withing the next ~1 sentence and then the usual LLM bs follows which I just wanted to skip at that point
Fantastic to see this. I use voice a lot. It’s not quite lived up to my expectations but I think this gets much closer.
I looks like they took inspiration from Thinking Machines - http://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/
I want this in my ear when I'm talking to people, so I can carry a real conversation.
The new architecture makes sense, it seems many of the remaining problems like noise and interruptions are at the sound processing and integration level rather than at an architectural or model level now which makes for an exciting new era.
Looking forward to a list of support languages. This would be amazing for language listening/speaking practice. Yes I know it doesn't replace the talking to real people and "immersion". But cheaper than a flight
I use AI for my job. I understand the impact (as much as anyone can) that it will have on society. I recognize the value.
But I just want to say that talking with AI casually is critically lame. I cringe every time I have to ask my Google Home to turn on the lights and people are having full-on conversations with it? And, imo, dangerous considering how sycophantic AI is. The stupidest, most gullible, most insecure person right now is looking at this thinking they are about to make a new friend.
Reserving judgment until the actual feature is set public. The announcement post itself doesn't tell you much.
Absolutely can't wait to try this for language practice. The advanced voice mode is great but ultimately just doesn't work that well and doesn't have the feel of a natural conversation.
Is this website heavily vibe coded. I tried to select text and things went black.
https://imgur.com/a/ABGWRTO
This voice is awful, possibly one of the worst AI/computer voices I have heard in like two years now - what's up with that? Is this seriously the best a company burning this much money can do, and they consider this acceptable to release? Like two syllables in and my first response was to grimace and physically cringe. Does anyone here think this sounds good, or even just "fine enough"?
Do engineers that work on this for long periods of time stop seeing the forest for the trees and think this could be mistaken as human? I'm saying this as someone that assumes all narration/most VO work will be fully AI fairly soon (for better or worse.)...
What don't you like about the voice? Geniune question, I'm not using it in English but I think it sounds fine in my language, and it's an improvement over the previous one.
It's just... Very robotic and clearly generated, makes random inhuman pitch shifts, etc.. Very alien overall.
There's like 10 voices to choose from.
Do any voice models support different conversation "threads" with different context?
When GPT-Live in Codex, so i can walk the dog while shipping?
>Delegation for deeper work
Except that you can't actually delegate since connectors and tools are not supported.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POI5XHAU0sc
I do not fully understand the complexity behind achieving full-duplex but I hope this sets the bar for Anthropic to follow. Turn-based simplex is yesterday.
It sounds like they've switched to a "native audio" model which if I understand right is what Gemini has had for quite a while?
I used it a few times. It's weird. It reminded me of Christopher Walken with all the oddly placed pauses.
GPT-Live: because what every Zoom meeting needed was an AI that can also zone out and ask you to repeat the question
Great to hear about full-duplex. When using voice mode historically, it was infuriating to have the AI go on a long-winded rant or explanation and I would be shouting again and again "stop. shut up. shut up! shut up!!!"; I just needed a clean way to interrupt it.
Does this support more than one user voice? Or, are there plans for this? I did not see that mentioned in the announcement.
(Atty from OpenAI here)
You can choose among 9 voices in the app, all newly refreshed for GPT-Live. If you meant whether it can detect multiple people, it can (like in the livestream), but not always perfect. Would love to hear your feedback once you try it.
Any plans to add more international voices and dialects?
I was expecting the grandma voice to be the voice model and i was like woah this is incredibly good
watched the live translation video very impressive
Seems like a shift from previous voice models where it sequentially processes voice to text then feeds it to LLM and then back which cant escape the clunky lag
not sure how pipecat stands now, gpt live seems like it takes audio tokens and does inference on it directly
I've wondered if this would happen, although doing inference directly on speech tokens would seem to imply an entirely different model (trained on lots and lots of actual speech).
Quite sad to think society will more easily be apart and develop a relation with a company bot
Not had a chance to experiment yet, but will this be an upgrade for using AI for language learning?
OT: This commercial video is gorgeous looking and I adore the actors!
Oh gosh. I was watching the video and thought it is a live stream. I just noticed when it restarted.
Anyone else find the use of the ladies in the videos to be pretty patronising? Or just me...?
I'm at the point where pricing is the first thing I look for in announcements like this.
How does the voice model delegate requests to GPT-5.5? Can the voice model generate text?
I wonder why they don't compare it to their existing live voice model realtime-2.
Can a model like this critique your accent/pronunciation? That would be cool.
this is excellent, I've been meaning to update my phone-dialer.apk "fake phone conversation" for when I'm trying to get out of a social sitation (not joking)
Is it possible to create a "companion" of sorts with this model, using, say, an RPi and a speaker + microphone? Not for advanced scientific brainstorming, but for seniors who are often alone in their homes.
If this is my idea of hell, I can't imagine what it'd be like for a 90 year old
Try being a 90-year old with minimal social contact and nobody to talk to, wasting away in front of a TV blasting NewsMax or Fox News ... does that sound like Heaven or Hell?
Substituting one form of media for another does not improve the hypothetical situation at all, giving a senior nothing to do all day except talk to a spreadsheet is not a solution to that senior being lonely, it is a false dichotomy. Far lower tech solutions can be (and are) used. In my locale we have volunteer schoolchildren active in the community, as far as I know that's quite common, and even half an hour biweekly with a fake grandkid is many orders of magnitude healthier and more meaningful than swapping out their TV for this generation's take on Fox News.
It goes without saying all these tools are still largely in their pre-advertising state, it won't last.
I speak from experience. The last few weekends I've been taking a friend to see her grandma at a Senior Facility in Sonoma County, and it is really depressing to watch them either lying in bed, listlessly, or in a wheelchair, gazing away in the distance.
They need interaction. And a suitably prompted LLM _can_ provide such interaction. I'm not saying hook them up with ChatGPT and let them loose, but that with the right harnesses and guardrails, they could have a more interactive life.
Why do I have to solve a captcha to read a blog post?
If an idiot has this on in the subway my conversations are surveilled. What is the antidote? Train another model to talk about bombs etc. and flood the clanker (and by extension the FBI)?
I cannot wait for the qwen version on huggingface.
I reaaaaaally hope we have an option to disable those random ums and ahhs that interrupt for no reason. :|
I was surprised all that made it into the demo video. Did not seem cool. Is that "active listening" or something?
Its actually useful, when you are launching into a long monologue and want periodic acknowledgement that its "listening".
I have now had a chance to use it, and it never interrupted me. Weird call for the video to include that. Works very well, and can even mash up languages.
I think it would make me stop speaking. I guess it might take me some time to get used to it.
I think it just doesn't know when it's its turn to speak, and cancels itself out when it hears humans.
>and linked parents may be notified in higher-risk situations involving signs of potential self-harm or suicidal intent.
This is an abuse of user trust and violates people's privacy.
This had to land before there new device could be launched, i.e. human to AI full duplex interaction, Apple should be worried. They fumbled so hard on AI.
I am wondering for whom this new device even would be. Because phones work quite well for this use case and much more and everyone already has a phone.
Can a phone go get you a coffee?
cant wait for husk irl to test this
Great video by the way. Extremely good!
One piece of feedback on that to anyone from their team, could not get audio sync in Firefox. Chrome worked fine.
if I'm not mistaken - Amazon Nova Sonic has been full duplex for a while.
At first I was really impressed, I thought granny was the voice. But it turns out it's the same kind of annoying voice and tone. And then Constance starts talking to it and it immediately cuts her off at 1:05, after they just explained it was better at conversation flow.
Seems a bit disappointing, but the 3 overlapping questions example was impressive.
This is getting way too dystopian for my taste. People in the know need to stop pushing the narrative that this is somehow anything more than statistical autocomplete.
Any pricing announced yet?
ok but how many es has "beekeeper"?
are these human actors or are is the whole demo AI generated?
Didn't Standard Intelligence release a duplex model two years ago? Sounds disingenuous to market this as a new generation of voice models, when it is really OpenAI finally catching up to the current generation after two years.
https://si.inc/posts/hertz-dev/
I just tried this and I find the constant interruptions infuriating: ah, alright, mh, mh-mh, go on, etc. This means the model already reliably detected my point/question isn’t finished. Please give me an option or dial to tone down the back channel noise.
how about api access?
(Atty from OpenAI here)
Coming soon! Sign up to be notified here: https://openai.com/form/gpt-live-1-in-the-api/
Haven't tried this, but talking to Claude in its app is so much better than talking to Siri that Apple should be ashamed. It got every word perfectly the first time, including programming / project management terms.
Meanwhile, Siri struggles to send basic texts to my kids.
I hope they fixed the models in that they don't interrupt and jump in and that you can order them to be silent. Previous model could not be silent and always cut me off and spoke over me.
I for one am greatly looking forward to the day these kind of voice models can be run locally. It seems like the gap between open-weight and frontier is way larger for voice models than coding/language models.
Probably not _as_ good, but you can run gemma 4 for the ears/brain (accepts audio input), and kokoro TTS for the mouth. You want something like silero VAD sitting in front of the LLM so you aren't passing wasteful audio to gemma 4, so you send only voice activity segments. I type all this because I tried it out recently as a Zork experience, seeing how creative Gemma 4 12B could be. It was surprisingly good!
Yeah, I mostly mean for the TTS, which in my testing is flat and has no emotional register, or no nuanced variation. OpenAI speech in my experience is very good at things like communicating understanding or questions non-verbally using intonation, and I'm yet to see a local TTS model that will do contextual intonation well at all.
Her is here?
Definitely in the right direction in terms of architecture. However those "hmmm" "uh huh" interjected in the demo are pretty awful.
What the fuck is the rationale to make this? I can kinda see the rationale behind Facebook and social media, they _could_ be useful. But this? This is like making a nuclear bomb out in public. The world is going to get a LOT worse in the next 20 years. I am not talking about energy usage. I am talking about a society where everyone is TRULY inside their own bubble of creation.
>GPT‑Live can show it’s paying attention with phrases like “mhmm” or “yeah” [...]
Nooooooo!
Yeah, I mean - I know that people do this in real life, but when I encountered this recently while trying GPT-Live, it was truly annoying - I felt like it kept causing me to lose my train of thought. Perhaps if it was a bit more adaptive or could even be turned off.. but if it does this every.. single... time... I am saying something and I pause for a second... ugh.
Feel like the intro video is very odd.
Basically have an older lady (not their target audience) blatantly reading a teleprompter.
Why are they going after this audience? Retired people have no use for delegated tasks or information. They also are the least likely to use it and not get frustrated.
to show that anybody could use it - even older people who are less tech experts.
they are trying to expand beyond their tech audience.
GPT-Live... buy me that thing I saw on tv
GPT, now with more interruptions!
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With this, human translators have been totally and absolutely a solved problem with this version of real time translation.
This time is the most natural version that exists and it is a natural as a conversation.
To Downvoters: Why aren't you feeling the AGI?
“I don’t translate, I interpret” - Ahmed the best interpreter there ever was
They most definitely did not solve real time translation yet. The French in the video is barely understandable, both the translation and the pronunciation are the quality of an American who hasn't used French since high-school.
This. It was shockingly bad. Non-"live" translations are much better.
It's exciting for the future, though!
So true! I am not sure if it was on purpose that the model spoke with a so strong accent!
Why aren't you feeling the operating loss? :(
So more AI psychoses coming.
GPT-Live being developed in california and being an over-active listener...
"i'm starving."
sounds cynical in my ears. energy demand of these toys will cause many problems, people elsewhere starving being one of them.