For the tenth day of “ship-mas,” OpenAI rolled out a option to name ChatGPT for as much as quarter-hour totally free over the cellphone utilizing 1-800-CHATGPT.
The characteristic was a venture spun up just some weeks in the past, OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil mentioned on the livestream. Customers can now name ChatGPT within the US and message through WhatsApp globally at 1-800-242-8478. The 15-minute restrict is per cellphone quantity monthly, so actually, you may spin up a number of Google Voice numbers to get as a lot time with it as you need.
The cellphone quantity is constructed utilizing OpenAI’s Realtime API, and the WhatsApp characteristic is powered by GPT-4o mini by way of an integration with the WhatsApp API.
OpenAI sees this characteristic as an vital stepping stone for newcomers to AI, because the service represents a simplified model of ChatGPT in comparison with its web-based counterpart and gives a “low-cost option to strive it out by way of acquainted channels.” The corporate notes that current customers in search of extra complete options, larger utilization limits, and personalization choices ought to proceed utilizing their common ChatGPT accounts by way of conventional channels.
Funnily sufficient, Google launched an identical instrument in 2007 known as GOOG-411, which provided free listing help by voice. The service was discontinued in 2010 with out an official clarification from Google, however some speculate that it was shut down as a result of the corporate had already achieved its underlying aim: accumulating a adequate database of voice samples to advance its speech recognition expertise.
On the time, Google VP Marissa Mayer mentioned it outright: “The speech recognition consultants that we’ve got say: If you would like us to construct a very strong speech mannequin, we’d like lots of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a selected voice with a selected intonation. So we’d like lots of people speaking, saying issues in order that we will in the end practice off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of various speech samples in order that whenever you name up or we’re making an attempt to get the voice out of video, we will do it with excessive accuracy.”
OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson mentioned the corporate received’t be utilizing these calls to coach massive language fashions.