Once likened to the voice of Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson, OpenAI decided to shelve one of the voices of its AI chatbot, named Sky. According to a recent blog post, this decision was made by the AI company, led by Sam Altman, over the weekend after the launch of its new GPT-4o model last week.
"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice — Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice," stated OpenAI.
The company added, "For the privacy of our voice actors, we cannot share names of our voice talents."
Scarlett Johansson took to X to respond to the news. She revealed that the tech company OpenAI had approached her back in September regarding the possibility of providing a voice for their system.
“Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system,” Johansson shared on X.
However, she declined the offer “after much consideration and for personal reasons” and expressed surprise upon hearing the demo.
In response, Altman had said the voice of Sky belongs to no one, including Johansson, and was never intended to sound like her.
In September 2023, OpenAI added voice capabilities to give users another way of interacting with ChatGPT.
"Since then, we are encouraged by the way users have responded to the feature and the individual voices. Each of the voices — Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and Sky — are sampled from voice actors we partnered with to create them,” the company explained.
In the recent demonstration, people got to see just how good the AI has gotten at conversing.
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