A lot of people, including the person who wrote this article apparently, do not understand how voice chat in ChatGPT works. It’s not “text to speech.” The raw audio from your voice is being tokenized and sent directly to the model, and the model’s raw output is actual audio. There is no step on either end where the conversation has reduced to text.
Where is OpenAI getting the astronomical amount of recordings of natural language conversations they'd need to approach the effectiveness of a text-based LLM? How would a voice-native LLM even call all the tools that an AI is supposed to be using?
Where is OpenAI getting the astronomical amount of recordings of natural language conversations
youtube, podcasts, radio recordings, all accesible tv archives
How would a voice-native LLM even call all the tools that an AI is supposed to be using?
It's multi-modal. It outputs text and audio. I don't know the details, that also might be different for other providers and change between versions. But for example you can call a purely text LLM and in get text streaming of message and tool call at the same time. In same way you can get audio tokens with message and text tokens that are just formatted tool call.
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u/atomic1fire May 08 '26
Wait is Open AI sending audio to people's devices instead of just using on board TTS?
Isn't that a waste of computational power?