OpenAI has introduced a new "read aloud" feature to its popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. Read aloud your responses both on the web and in the mobile app.

It uses the same technology behind ChatGPT Voice, a mobile app that can be accessed through a new speaker icon at the bottom of messages and allows users to have full conversations with AI models.

The voice-over continues even when you leave the ChatGPT screen, so you can continue to listen to the voice-over while doing other tasks.

There is a new settings menu option launched alongside "Read Aloud" that allows you to change the voice. [5 options, including Jupiter, Breeze, Ember, Cove, and Sky, allow for a mix of male, female, and android voices.

Each has a natural inflection and sounds like the AI breathing or pausing to think, which is fun at first but quickly becomes annoying.

According to OpenAI, the "read aloud" feature is for "when you need to be hands-free or when hearing a message aloud helps you understand it better."

It can also be used when you want the AI to tell you a fun story or when you are writing something like a speech and want to hear it aloud to see how it sounds.

In addition to being able to hear what ChatGPT replies to, OpenAI says it makes it easy to find the voice feature within the ChatGPT app.

This includes an updated voice-to-text icon on the right side of the message box. This icon will be a microphone to "bring it closer to what people are used to."

The ability to understand more than synthetic voice and text input has been available to all ChatGPT users since November. This means they will be able to use images, text, voice, and soon video as input.

Other AI bots, such as Google Gemini and Anthropic's Claude 3, are beginning to adopt multimodality, but in my experience the voice aspect of ChatGPT has not yet been surpassed by other AI.

This new feature is enabled by default and cannot be disabled. If you want to use it, here's how:

Using it on the web

To have ChatGPT read out your reply on the web, tap the "read aloud" speaker icon below your message.

To change the voice, click on your name in the lower left corner, then Settings, then New Sleep. Simply click on the voice you want to use.

Using on mobile

On mobile, tap and hold the text you want ChatGPT to read and select the "Read Aloud" context menu option.

Unlike on the web, you can also pause, fast-forward, or rewind the audio, or set it to read future messages aloud.

By default, the same audio is used as ChatGPT Voice. You can change the speaker by tapping the menu icon in the upper left corner, tapping your name, and then tapping the voice.