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The voice user interface for natural two-way conversation is GPT’s killer feature. Gemini also suppports voice input, which I use to make interactions easier on desktop. Hopefully Anthopic will add at least speech-to-text support, although I understand smartphones often include that already. That said, the OpenAI Whisper TTS is really nice for English language input.

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I find the two way voice to be unnatural and difficult to manage. I also find myself needing more time to compose my thoughts in the middle of a prompt than the ChatGPT conversation input allows me. The weird breaths and stuff kinda creep me out.

Good point, the cadence and intonation can feel unnatural.

I still believe that voice user interface is one of the more power and profound shifts these tools offer. They’re among the first generation of technologies that can parse human speech, follow commands, and if desired respond with speech. Those capabilities are more powerful when coupled with the ability to compress vast amounts of knowledge and generalize.

Like anything, LLMs and multi-modal models are far from perfect and raise many ethical and philosophical concerns. I’m cautiously optimistic as I believe voice interaction can make technology much more widely accessible and helpful to many people.

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