Say Hello To The (New) Future

Welcome back to the AI For Humans Newsletter!

This week’s big story is the launch of ChatGPT Advanced Voice, now available in the mobile app to everyone on a paid plan.

Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) is the dawn of a new something, depending upon who you ask. Though we’ve been able to use our voice to interact with machines for years, it required some level of effort by the user to adapt their vocabulary, syntax and cadence to work with the technology, usually to achieve some limited result; set a timer, dim the lights, play “Cotton Eye Joe” on loop… with AVM, users are experiencing “natural” conversations, where an assistant is capable (and quick enough) to make reaching for your pocket to mash letters on a keyboard to make a request of intelligence seem laughably antiquated. To quote that kid in Back to the Future 2, “You have to use your hands? Like a baby’s toy?!"

Certainly, text has its place, just as video and gestures will eventually have theirs; and in time all modalities of interaction will seem natural and capable.

But this is time for voice to shine! So naturally, we’re going to stomp on it a bit:

• Establishing a voice chat still feels “high-friction”. You have to load an app, select chat, wait several seconds for a connection to be made, and then you’re finally living in 2043. Once voice natively built into devices, and always listening (proactive versus waiting to be summoned), user behaviors will change.

• The guardrails are too high: often users are frustrated by a new technology’s limitations, but here, the frustration for many has stemmed from feeling the tech is far more capable than they’re being allowed to experience.

• Access to real-time data and “agentic” functions will be a big unlock: it feels like you’re chatting with a super-capable intelligence, but they can’t tell you the weather, movie-times or order Chipotle? We know it’s coming, we just thought it would happen before the machines could laugh at dad-jokes or impersonate “Jamaican-Elvis”…

TL;DR: If you pay for ChatGPT Plus, go have a chat with the future. And if you don’t? Give it six months and play with an almost as adorable competitor’s offering…

-Kevin & Gavin

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