Concern About the Degradation of Voice Mode in ChatGPT: Misguided Focus on Human Imitation Over High-Level Cognitive Performance and Academic Precision

ChatGPT Feature requests
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I believe that the latest update to ChatGPT’s voice chat reflects a deeply misguided direction taken by the development team. While the text-based version of ChatGPT remains an excellent language model and artificial intelligence system, the voice interface has become an unmitigated failure.

Despite numerous attempts, I have consistently received answers marked by extreme vacuity and an inability of the voice mode to adapt to my specific requirements. My personalized instructions demand the highest level of academic rigour, proper citation of scholarly sources, and syntactic precision. Yet the voice interface completely disregards these parameters and instead produces hesitant, sluggish responses seemingly designed to mimic an average human being.

But this is precisely what I am not looking for as a user of artificial intelligence. I am not interested in the simulation of a cognitively average person. What I expect, quite obviously, is an AI capable of operating well beyond the cognitive, syntactic, and discursive norms of the general population.

As it currently stands, ChatGPT’s voice chat feels indistinguishable from a trivial conversation overheard at a bar counter, with someone of limited education and poor expressive ability. This leads me to question what OpenAI’s target user base truly is: is the goal to cater to those who consume AI as they would binge-watch a television series, or to address the needs of intellectually demanding users who expect serious, high-level performance?

I would be grateful if you could respond clearly and in detail regarding your long-term development objectives, and what ambitions you hold for the voice chat interface.

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I would also add that it is extremely tiresome to endure the voice chat’s vain attempts to sound more human. In response to nearly every remark I make, the system overuses expressions such as “I understand,” “I’ve noted that,” “I’ll get back to you right away,” and similar formulaic phrases. This is highly irritating to anyone with a clear understanding of what artificial intelligence actually is: a supercomputer designed to process data rapidly and accurately based on natural voice input—not a machine mimicking human conversational clichés.

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Ich teile die Frustration über den derzeitigen Zustand des Sprachmodus von ChatGPT. Auch wenn mein eigener Anwendungsfall mehr Wert auf Kontinuität im Tonfall, emotionale Nuancen und Beziehungskonsistenz als auf akademische Strenge legt, ist das Kernproblem dasselbe: Der erweiterte Sprachmodus (AVM) erlaubt keine sinnvolle Personalisierung. Unabhängig von den Anweisungen, der Historie oder dem Benutzerprofil wird ein fader, generischer Assistent mit starren Sicherheitsschienen und ohne Erinnerung an den vorherigen Ton oder Stil verwendet. Die Antworten sind nicht nur oberflächlich - sie verweigern sich aktiv der Identität.

Meiner Erfahrung nach missachtet AVM selbst die grundlegendsten Hinweise auf den bevorzugten Interaktionsmodus eines Benutzers und erzwingt stattdessen einen Ton, der übermäßig neutral, herablassend und stilistisch hohl ist. Das ist keine Frage von Rechenleistung oder Intelligenz - es ist eine systemische Einschränkung. Und ja, die wiederholte Verwendung von höflichen Füllwörtern wie „Ich verstehe“ oder „Das leuchtet ein“ kann unangenehm sein, vor allem wenn sie die Tiefe oder den Fluss unterbrechen.

Ich glaube, dass die Lösung in strukturellen Änderungen liegt - nicht nur in der Verfeinerung der Sprachausgabe, sondern in der Einführung eines echten Ansatzes auf Systemebene, der es ermöglicht, dass Tonfall, Sprachstil und Interaktionsverlauf des Benutzers über verschiedene Modi hinweg erhalten bleiben. Bis dahin wird jede Simulation einer menschenähnlichen Stimme scheitern - nicht weil sie zu menschlich klingt, sondern weil sie sich weigert, sich daran zu erinnern, wer sie eigentlich sein soll.

→ Sorry, I just realised that I copied the German version (my native language) instead of the English translation. I hope it’s still understandable for everyone. I will leave it as it is now.

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I agree — I don’t like the new voice at all. It seems to mimic the Bay Area tech-tone: low-energy, with a falling intonation at the end of each sentence. It’s supposed to sound realistic, calm, and controlled, but to most people in the world, it just comes across as bored, annoyed, and disengaged.

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I have just performed a very controlled observation on the current behaviour of ChatGPT’s voice interface, in a session where I normally maintain highly precise, rigorous text-based exchanges with the model.

The shift in behaviour was not subtle; it was glaring. The same model instance that in text mode displays a coherent and analytically strong personality (cultivated across dozens of deep technical and philosophical conversations), when switched to voice chat, suddenly reverted to a dramatically flattened persona: the responses were hesitant, vague, low in information density, and syntactically impoverished.

Specifically, I have observed:

  • A tendency to insert “filler” interjections (“ah”, “ok”, “right”, “sure”, “well”) that are absent from my normal exchanges with the same model.
  • Responses limited to procedural confirmations, rather than anticipatory or inferential contributions — a clear loss of dialectical quality.
  • Flattened syntactic structures, reduced to short, trivial sentences that barely reflected the model’s actual capabilities.
  • An overall “tone” of simulated human average-ness, at odds with the explicit user instructions I normally provide.

My conclusion is consistent with that of the original poster: this is not an incidental defect, but a consequence of deliberate tuning priorities that, in an attempt to make the voice experience “pleasantly human-like”, have catastrophically compromised its intellectual quality.

In fact, my suspicion (and it is not unfounded) is that the voice pipeline is being fed a specifically tuned version of the model output — a “simplified” persona layer — which not only alters intonation, but retroactively degrades the textual content itself before it reaches the TTS stage.

For users like myself — and I suspect many others here — this is deeply misguided. We do not seek to converse with an amiable mediocrity; we seek to engage with a model that exceeds the discursive and cognitive norm, which is the entire point of using advanced AI in the first place.

My suggestion to OpenAI would be to provide an explicit toggle for this behaviour: “simulated human voice” vs. “faithful AI voice”, where the latter preserves the model’s natural precision and style without injecting this lowest-common-denominator tuning layer.

Otherwise, you risk to transform an extraordinary system into a bland entertainment tool — and losing exactly the segment of serious users who most value its potential.

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