I’m reporting a recurring problem with ChatGPT Read Aloud in the mobile app, along with a feature request.
Read Aloud is one of the most important ChatGPT features for me because I use ChatGPT heavily and often listen to responses while doing other things.
On mobile, Read Aloud has become very unreliable. Sometimes it fails with an error until I restart the app. More often, it starts reading normally, then halfway through jumps back to the beginning and starts over. It may repeat this multiple times. I estimate that roughly 70% of longer responses now fail to play all the way through.
Restarting the app sometimes fixes it temporarily.
I do not see this problem nearly as much when using Read Aloud from a computer browser or desktop environment, so it appears to be specific to the mobile app.
I’d also strongly suggest expanding Read Aloud into a more complete audio-player experience:
• Resume playback from where it stopped instead of restarting from the beginning.
• Add a progress/timeline bar that can be scrubbed.
• Add skip-forward and skip-back controls.
• Allow users to highlight a section of a response and choose Read Aloud for only that selection.
• Allow a selected section to be replayed easily for learning or reviewing difficult material.
For heavy ChatGPT users, Read Aloud is not just a convenience. It is a major way of consuming the information ChatGPT generates, similar to listening to a podcast or audiobook.