OpenAI today brings users a practical update in the face of competition from rival Anthropic's latest and most powerful large-scale language model (LLM): the voice narration feature of ChatGPT.

This new feature, called "Loud Reading," can be used on ChatGPT's mobile applications for iOS and Android. On the mobile app, users can tap and hold the text to open the "Loud Reading" player, and then play, pause, or rewind the content. The web version displays a speaker icon below the text.

This new feature comes as OpenAI faces a new lawsuit with Elon Musk and competitors like Anthropic and Google launch more powerful LLMs.

OpenAI has announced that this feature has been launched in the web version of ChatGPT, as well as in the iOS and Android versions of the ChatGPT app. Users simply need to click on the microphone icon below the chatbot's output to access it. This will be very useful for using ChatGPT on the go, when hands-free moments are needed, or when hearing the content read aloud helps with better understanding.

"Loud Reading" can read aloud in 37 languages, automatically detecting the language of the text being read. This feature is available for both GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. It is an interesting example of OpenAI's multimodal capabilities, the ability to read and respond across multiple media. OpenAI released this example shortly after rival Anthropic added a similar feature to its AI model.

It is worth mentioning that ChatGPT introduced voice chat functionality in September 2023, allowing users to directly ask questions to the chatbot without typing. This new feature will allow people to have ChatGPT read written answers aloud. Users can also set the chatbot to always respond verbally when prompted.