by Joe Lonergan

ChatGPT, Open AI’s viral AI chatbot, celebrated its 1st anniversary on November 30^th.

Up to recently, the ChatGPT app was really only useful to people who paid for the premium subscription. But this is changing.

Previously the voice conversation feature was only available for premium users but now Chat GPT has made the voice-only feature free for all and, guess what, this is great news for blind and low vision users as once activated you can use the conversational voice-only feature hands-free.

The voice-only option is only available in the app, on Android and IOS. It is not available on the website. To try it download the app and log in, tap voice mode and allow access to the microphone when prompted. There are several voices to choose from and you can sample each of them to hear what they sound like. The voices’ names are Jennifer, Ember, Cove, Sky, and Breeze.

Next, you can ask your question to start a conversation. The dialogue begins smoothly and becomes more challenging as you pose intricate questions, such as requesting a poem about Ireland. Chat GPT then goes into action, taking about 30 seconds to craft a beautiful poem, which is subsequently presented to you in a seamlessly natural voice. During the brief wait for a response, you receive pleasant haptic feedback as an indicator that the system is actively processing your request.is working on it.

When finished chatting to the AI bot you can tap on stop and close. The app is accessible with VoiceOver. It is a little weird having a chat with something without having to use a wake word, but I think it is something we will get used to.

I really liked the experience, and I was really impressed with the quality of the voices. We asked it many questions about sport and general knowledge and eye conditions, and it always made a good effort at answering these questions, Mostly accurate but be aware it is not always accurate and some of its information is out of date. It did announce some of its knowledge was from its most recent knowledge base up to January 2022 so it can not be relied upon. But saying that it helps compose tricky e-mails, write poems, create strategies, and have fun for now.

I can foresee this being built into smart speakers and becoming a useful tool the more it becomes accurate and faster in its responses. With the speed at which AI is growing, we can not put a timeline on this. What a turnaround from the sacking and Hiring controversy of Sam Altman from last week and then to go and announce voice mode for free for all users.

But why offer voice mode for free? Some say it was to maintain balance after all the controversy, but it is more probable it will use it as a learning model and grab more data, and learn all new dialects from its new free users.

Over the last six months, AI has already made massive improvements to the Be My Eyes app, The Seeing AI app, the Envision Glasses, and many more products. We can not wait to see what is next for Open AI.