a voice chat with chatgpt

It was about shoelaces; I don't know why I decided to do it instead of typing things out. Probably because it was easier — I mean the other alternative was voice to text which, is how I am typing out this email post, but I wanted to have a conversation just for the heck of it. It was kind of creepy at first. 

The first step to go through is you have to pick a voice for chatGPT to use and, I don't know, I felt kind of weird with most of the voices that came back. The first one was a British voice and it was a male. There are other voices — with female voices, though, for some reason it felt weird to me picking a female voice. I ended up going with what was described as "Ember". It's a male voice, kind of bright and upbeat. 

So I started speaking and I was asking about how to loosen my shoes and because they were too tight at my forefoot. It suggested methods I've seen before but so I could have just as easily looked at myself. I didn't end up going with the suggestions that it made (I do have looser shoes now, by the way), but the conversation itself was interesting. 

The people behind chatGPT made the conversation from the bots to sound like a phone call. The voice sounded somewhat natural — not perfect, you could probably tell it was chatGPT out of context. But the sound of the voice on the other end sounded like a phone call so sort of like you were hearing the voice through a bit of a filter. I thought that was kind of neat and they even gave the voice some pauses. 

They were made to "sound" natural, like how you would have a conversation I don't think it used very many filler words like I'm using "like" a lot right now when I'm doing the voice to text, but it did do some slight repetition of some words to make it sound like someone was speaking with a natural rhythm. 

I don't know if I would use it again for regular searches — I mean typing either on the computer or on my phone is just fine, but I think I would consider doing it if I was having some sort of brainstorming session maybe and I needed to bounce ideas back and forth. The neat thing is that they save the conversation and it's transcribed in a chat so you can refer to it later. I think you can actually play the voice back although I'm not sure if you can play your own voice back, which raises some privacy issues but that's something you have to decide for yourself.