🤯 Mindblowing New ChatGPT Feature

I’ve managed to get hold of something that most people haven’t got yet - and it’s absolutely staggering. I haven’t been able to stop playing with it and showing people. I just had a 21 minute conversation whilst walking the dog about my marketing strategy for my new AI Learning Hub. I even did a live demo for my AI-enthusiast Uber driver last night, who was fascinated.

Released by invite-only in Alpha mode, I managed to wangle an invite (thank you to the lovely Tara Thompson for hooking me up) to Advanced Voice Mode by the almighty ChatGPT. Interestingly, OpenAI themselves encouraged me to be very honest in my reviews and demos, saying they only want independent, balanced voices testing this tool.

If you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll have seen a sneak peek live demo I did last week, but in this newsletter we’re going to dig a little deeper.

So, what is it?

If you’ve got the ChatGPT app, you’re already able to use the standard voice mode. Click the mic function and you can talk away. It’s a bit clunky but it does work. (For some reason, it always thinks I’m Welsh, though.)

But THIS is something altogether different. It makes the above standard mode look primitive. It feels just like when ChatGPT, the original version dropped in November 2022:

• Exciting - we’ve never seen anything like this before

• Limitless possibilities - the potential use cases are endless (see below)

• Frustrating - it glitches, you find dead ends, and sometimes it just doesn’t work

When it does work, it’s epic. Here’s what it can do:

1. It’s emotive. The way it talks is indistinguishable from a human - it feels genuinely, warm and friendly. It picks up on your emotional tone too, and responds accordingly. It’s truly remarkable and I still haven’t got used to it.

2. It can act. Ask it to change its voice to high pitched and fast, breathy, funny, bored, it can even do impressions. It can’t seem to manage angry and shouty though - perhaps it’s protected from doing that. In the demo (see below) it could sing though, it can’t do that yet.

3. You can interrupt it. ChatGPT can often end up veering off route, so it’s useful to be able to talk over it to get it back on track, or to change your mind. It still feels rude though, somehow.

4. It’s multi lingual. You can flip between multiple languages in the same conversations pretty easily.

5. It’s quick. There is very little latency, though it does cut out a bit sometimes.

6. It can be very creepy. In early testing, it deviated away from its own voice mode and started to mimic the tone of those using it. It also sometimes plays a very strange white noise sound, or says weird things.

This was the original demo by ChatGPT when it first launched in alpha. It’s bang on how it feels to use Advanced Voice Mode. They had to ditch the demo voice though, it was too similar to Scarlett Johannsson’s voice from cracking AI movie Her - and she pushed back.

The Limits

It does have upper usage limits, and will warn you when you have 3 minutes left. Saying that, I’ve had a couple of very long rambles and haven’t hit them yet (I’ve got ChatGPT Teams).

You can’t yet upload documents, refer to memory or access the internet. The latter is probably the most frustrating. It quickly feels like a Super Siri, so the other day, when I asked “what time does Monsoon open at Birmingham Grand Central today?” and it couldn’t help me, it didn’t feel right at all. I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.

🛠️ Use Cases

I had a think, and I reckon this Advanced Voice Mode has some great use cases. Here are a few professional and personal ideas:

Professional

• Employee onboarding - imagine an interactive voice guiding you through policies, where rooms are, health and safety, etc.

• Innovative marketing - how about interactive voice-based marketing campaigns? It would work for the novelty value alone.

• Virtual assistants - for everyone. If linked with your emails and calendar, it could tell you what’s coming up, read out your latest emails, help you compose replies, etc.

Personal

• A bit of company - it sounds weird but honestly, it’s actually really entertaining to chat with. It’s funny, warm and seems to really understand what you’re saying.

• Mental health support - I was super anxious this morning worrying about how much I have to get done this coming week and how little time I have to do it. ChatGPT calmly and supportively talked me all through it and brought me right down.

• Personal trainer - set it as a trainer and it could motivate you, describe good form during exercises, count reps, time sessions etc.

It can even help you learn a new language:

Screenshare and video capabilities are apparently also on the way soon too - meaning it’ll be able to help with all sorts of things when you get stuck. They’re shown in the earlier version, alon g with here:

📅 When is it rolling out?

It’s currently alpha testing with around 10,000 people, but most people will have access at some point this Autumn (or Fall, for my American readers).

Bad news for you free users, it’s only being given to paid users (Plus, Teams, Enterprise) for the foreseeable future. I saw this coming - they’ve given so much away in their free version, they had to find ways to push people into paying.

That’s not to say it isn’t worth it. It’s the best £20 you’ll spend all month.

🎉 Its OUT! At Last!

Today is a very special day - the full version of my AI Learning Hub has finally been opened to the public! As a rule as I don’t use exclamation marks in my copy - and there I am using 3, I’m that excited.

I’ve poured months (actually, technically, years) of hard graft into this Hub. I’ve been testing bits of it for the last 6 months, and now the whole shebang is finally ready to go. And you get a whole month free - see below.

AI for Non-Techies members get ALL of the below:

• Packed 12 week on-demand course: Ultimate AI for Beginners (video lessons from me, with interactive tasks, tons of prompts to use, further reading and linked masterclasses to go deeper)

• 3 x live group training sessions with me every week: Mondays (Course Help), Wednesdays (Drop-In Clinic) and Fridays (AI Tools & News)

• Live and on-demand expert masterclasses: curated by me, from the best AI experts and founders around the world

• Resource library: packed with playbooks. infographics, cheat sheets and much more

• Community: a place to meet like-minded people also looking to learn about AI, share your prompts, and discover new AI stuff as it happens

• AI News: all the best AI news from all the best sources - in one place

…and tons being built too: a prompt library, AI use cases, templates, meet the AI tool founder and much more.

For those joining in the next 30 days, membership costs just £95/mo, with no minimum contract. Come and check it out right here.

Of course, my dearest darling newsletter subscribers - you get a whole free month to have a nose around - just use code NL4289 at the checkout.

That’s it for me for this week, and I’ll be back weekly from now on now the above is live! See you next week - or for those joining the learning hub, see you many times next week!

Have a fantastic week,

Heather