Ex-OpenAI president Greg Brockman announces ChatGPT voice support now open to all

The leadership turmoil at OpenAI continued this week as one of its co-founders publicly commented on a new ChatGPT feature release despite no longer being employed by the AI company.

Greg Brockman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and served as president until resigning in protest last week, posted on its X account about ChatGPT's new voice narration feature being made available to all users.

ChatGPT's text-to-speech voice feature, announced in September, uses a neural network model to generate human-like speech from text. By sampling a few seconds of recorded audio from professional voice actors, the system is able to create custom voices with varied accents and styles.

The feature was previously only accessible to paying ChatGPT's Plus subscribers but is now being rolled out more broadly.

To use the new voice option, ChatGPT users simply need to open the app settings on Android or iOS and toggle the "headphones" icon to activate text-to-speech playback. Listening to ChatGPT's responses enhances the user experience of the conversational AI and makes it more accessible.

However, Brockman's commentary on the new feature, without involvement from the company, adds another odd twist to the leadership confusion. Brockman's status at OpenAI is unclear following his resignation on Friday in response to the board of directors' abrupt firing of CEO Sam Altman.

In other news, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella decided to open himself to questions from business media outlets about OpenAI. In a video interview with Bloomberg, reporter Emily Chang asked Nadella if Altman told him he wanted to return to OpenAI, but he did not answer.

"We really want to partner with OpenAI and we want to partner with Sam," Nadella said. "And so In respect of where Sam is, he is working with Microsoft, and that is the case on Friday and that is the case today, and I absolutely believe that will be the case tomorrow."

While OpenAI has found a new CEO, the future strategic priorities of the AI labs remain unclear.