Now ChatGPT can hear, see and respond like a human

(CNN) – Yes, you read that right: you can now speak out loud with ChatGPT and hear responses from your AI-powered chatbot.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced Monday that it is rolling out new features, including the ability to let users engage in a voice conversation with a chatbot.

In a post on the company’s blog, OpenAI explained how this new feature can be used to “request a bedtime story for your family or settle a discussion at the dinner table.”

OpenAI’s new voice features are similar to those currently offered by Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri voice assistants.

In a demo of the new update shared by OpenAI, a user asks ChatGPT to tell him a story about “an adorable hedgehog named Larry.” The chatbot can tell a story in a human-like voice and can also answer questions like “What was your house like?” and “Who is your best friend?”

ChatGPT’s speech feature is “powered by a new text-to-speech model, capable of generating human-like voice from just text and a few seconds of speech sample,” Open AI noted in the blog post. The company added that it collaborated with professional voice actors to create five different voices that can be used to animate the chatbot.

OpenAI also said Monday that it is rolling out a new feature that will allow ChatGPT to respond to requests that include an image. For example, you can take a photo of the contents of your fridge and ask your chat boy to help you create a meal plan using the ingredients you have on hand. In addition, the company said that you can also ask it to focus on a specific part of the image using the “Drawing Tool” in the app.

The new features will be rolled out to the app over the next two weeks for paid subscribers to ChatGPT’s Plus and Enterprise services. (Plus costs $20 per month, and its Enterprise service is currently offered to business customers only.)

OpenAI’s updates come amid a race to develop AI in the tech sector, which was initially fueled by the public launch of ChatGPT late last year. In recent weeks, tech giants have been quick to introduce new updates that bring more AI-powered tools directly to their core products. Last week, Google announced a series of updates to Bard, its tool to compete with ChatGPT. Also last week, Amazon said it would get an AI-powered generative update to its Alexa voice assistant.