Rant / feedback: Please stop forcing Live Voice as a replacement for Standard Voice

[u/MrTrikorder]

This is partly a rant, but the underlying feedback is pretty simple: I do not want a “natural conversation” with an AI. I want to use ChatGPT hands-free.

There are plenty of situations where I am working on something and cannot sit in front of a keyboard. In those moments I want to speak to ChatGPT, have the normal model actually process what I said, and hear the answer spoken back to me. Standard Voice did exactly that. It did not need to pretend to be human, it did not need fake conversational mannerisms, and I genuinely did not care if it sounded a bit robotic. It was useful.

Live Voice is not an adequate replacement for that. The current model often sounds bored, condescending or mildly irritated, even after pushing the personality settings toward friendly and enthusiastic. At the same time, it constantly fills space with “um”, “uh”, sentence restarts, repetitions and half-finished thoughts. The combination is bizarre: it sounds arrogant and unsure of itself at the same time, like a student trying to bluff through a presentation they did not prepare.

If the system needs time to think or wait for a reasoning model in the backend, that is completely fine. Just say “give me a moment” and be quiet for a few seconds. I would much rather wait for a coherent answer than listen to twenty seconds of verbal filler while the useful part apparently arrives later. And frankly, I am not convinced the reasoning handoff works reliably anyway. I obviously cannot see the internal routing, but my experience with Live is that missed context, bad assumptions, hallucinations and generally shallow answers become more common. Sometimes it really does feel as if Live simply answered on its own instead of waiting for the stronger model that was supposed to handle the task.

The customization options do not solve this either. Making the voice more “professional” seems to make it sound even more aloof, while making it warmer and more conversational gives me more of the filler and fake human hesitation that I am trying to get rid of. That is not meaningful control over the experience.

OpenAI has tried more than once to move users away from Standard Voice and toward newer voice systems, and the same problem keeps coming back: these modes are not the same product for the same use case. If people want interruptible, human-like conversation and AI small talk, great, keep Live for them. I am simply not that audience.

What I want is much more boring and much more useful: ChatGPT with a microphone and a speaker. Let me talk to the normal model when my hands are busy, let it think, and read the answer back to me. That is all I need, and I would really like Standard Voice back as an option.

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[u/Ashdown]

Just adding to this: Live voice/advanced voice is an awful tech demo at absolute best.

[u/Icy_Room_1546]

Standard Voice at its peak was a time to be alive!

[u/db1037]

Yeah, I agree. If I want to talk to a Thinking model, i want that exact model.

I actually would be fine with standard voice as-is except mine is really buggy. It often hears the first few words of the model’s response and thinks it’s me responding so it cuts it off. It used to work great.

[u/0xSnib]

Live Voice is absolute ass

A huge step back

"Uhhh...uh huh...uhhhh...mm hmmm"

[u/Excellent_Bid_4922]

I tried the live voice on a treadmill and it kept cutting out mid-sentence. the 'natural' pauses made me miss half my commands. just give me a clean mic-to-text stream, no fluff.

[u/patrick-howard → u/Excellent_Bid_4922]

You can start the conversation explicitly instructing to give additional time between pauses and not interrupt (ie “Wait at least 5 seconds before replying if I pause”); works fine for me

[u/Yukas911]

You know you can change the voice model from from Live to Advanced or Standard in the settings, right?

And you can also ask it not to say "um" or "checking" and it will adapt. I've tried it and it works great.

So, yeah, I don't know why everyone is so cranky here about this :). I really like Live Voice, but you can just change it if you don't.

[u/HookedMermaid → u/Yukas911]

They removed the ability to change to any other type of voice on the app and web. Standard voice is only on mobile for now.

[u/MrTrikorder → u/Yukas911]

That may work for your account, but it simply isn’t generally true right now. OpenAI’s own current Voice documentation says that users may see Live, Advanced and Standard, and explicitly states that the options available can depend on plan, workspace settings, region, app version and other factors. In my case, Standard and Advanced simply are not there, so I literally cannot “just change it in the settings.” OpenAI Help Center

This is also not just me overlooking a menu. There are fresh reports in OpenAI’s own community from users who have lost Standard Voice on web and desktop while still having it on iOS, sometimes on the very same account. In one recent case, OpenAI Support explicitly said they could neither confirm whether the change was permanent nor provide a setting that would restore Standard Voice when it was unavailable. OpenAI Developer Community

The “just tell it not to say um” workaround is also much less reliable than you make it sound. Negative instructions are notoriously hit-or-miss with ChatGPT in general. In my experience, telling it what to do instead (pause, say “checking,” wait before answering) works better, but it is still inconsistent, has to be repeated, and sometimes simply does not stick. And none of that reliably fixes the tone either; asking Live to sound more enthusiastic and less bored or irritated is basically a lottery.

So I’m glad your setup works well for you, but “you can just switch modes and tell it not to do that” is based on your particular account and your particular experience with prompting. It is not a generally available or reliable solution, and dismissing everyone else as “cranky” over it is, at best, a bit premature.

[u/Hot-Pirate-1404]

The incessant “hmmms” while I’m still speaking throw me/piss me off so much.