OpenAI’s “12 Days of OpenAI” continued apace on Wednesday with the development team announcing a new seasonal voice for ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode (AVM), as well as new video and screen-sharing capabilities for the conversational AI feature.
Santa Mode, as OpenAI is calling it, is a seasonal feature for AVM, and offers St. Nick’s dulcet tones as a preset voice option. It is being released to Plus and Pro subscribers through the website and mobile and desktop apps starting today and will remain so until early January. To access the limited-time feature, first sign in to your Plus or Pro account, then click on the snowflake icon next to the text prompt window.
Select Santa’s voice from the popup menu, confirm your choice, and start chatting. I, for one, am not entirely clear on why you’d want to talk to a large language model masquerading as a fictional religious figure, much less shell out $20 for the privilege, but OpenAI seems to believe it holds value. Note that the system will not log your chats with Santa, they won’t be saved to your chat history, nor will they impact the memory of ChatGPT.
Just in time for the holidays, video and screensharing are now starting to roll out in Advanced Voice in the ChatGPT mobile app. pic.twitter.com/HFHX2E33S8
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 12, 2024
The company is also rolling out a long-awaited feature for Advanced Voice Mode: the ability to analyze video and screen shares through the mobile AVM interface. With it, you’ll be able to share your screen or video feed with ChatGPT, hold real-time conversations, and get it to answer questions about what you see, without needing to describe your surroundings or upload photos.
The new feature is rolling out to Plus and Pro subscribers “in most countries” according to the company, as well as to all Teams users. Stringent privacy laws are delaying the feature’s release in the EU, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein, though the company hopes to get it to Plus and Pro subscribers in those regions “soon.” Enterprise and Edu users will have to wait until January to try it for themselves. If you have access, you can launch the new feature by opening voice mode, then tapping the video camera icon in the lower left. To launch screen share, just tap the three-dot menu and select “Share Screen.”
Wednesday’s announcement marks the fourth day of OpenAI’s live stream event. The company has already unveiled its fully-functional 01 reasoning model, its Sora video generation model, a $200/month Pro subscription tier, and updates to ChatGPT’s Canvas.