Review: ChatGPT’s New Advanced Voice Mode

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An iPhone with a marginally improved camera here, a Kia Sorento with a slightly better safety rating there. When you look back after a decade, the technology has clearly advanced—but each step along the way was so small that you didn’t really notice it when it landed.

Occasionally, though, you’ll encounter a new technology that ditches the incremental. Instead, it appears to truss the future to a sturdy rope and pull it hand over hand into the present.

In moments like these, previously state-of-the-art technology fossilizes before your eyes. You can see its desiccated bones crumple together into a dusty pile that you look at with nostalgia and pity.

That’s the experience of using ChatGPT’s new Advanced Voice Mode feature—and then returning to its precambrian precursors, Siri and Alexa.

I got alpha access to it last week, and I reviewed the basics of Advanced Voice Mode—including demos of my major use cases—on YouTube and X. If you’re interested, I suggest you check it out.

I’d like to dive deeper on a few use cases that underscore the leap-forward nature of this technology. The first is self-reflection, and the second is learning. But first, let’s start with what Advanced Voice Mode is and why it’s so different from what came before it.

What is Advanced Voice Mode?

ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode understands speech natively, meaning it doesn’t just read and write text. It reads and writes speech, too. This creates an experience that is distinctly better—more fluid, more fluent, and more authentic—than any other voice interaction I’ve ever had with a computer.