OpenAI’s new Read Aloud feature for ChatGPT could come in handy when users are on the go by reading its responses in one of five voice options out loud to users. It is now available on both the web version of ChatGPT and the iOS and Android ChatGPT apps.
Read Aloud can speak 37 languages but will auto-detect the language of the text it’s reading, and the feature is available for both GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. It’s an interesting example of what OpenAI can do with multimodal capabilities (the ability to read and respond through more than one medium) revealed soon after a competitor, Anthropic, added similar features to its AI models.
ChatGPT launched a voice chat feature in September 2023 where users can directly ask the chatbot prompts without typing. But the new feature will let people have ChatGPT read written answers aloud, and users can set up the chatbot to always respond verbally when responding to prompts.
On mobile apps, people can tap and hold the text to open the Read Aloud player, where they can play, pause, or rewind the readout. The web version shows a speaker icon below the text.