Read Aloud is Gone on Web & Windows—Still Works on Mobile. Why?

ChatGPT Bugs
44

Possible Technical Explanation for Current “Read Aloud” Disappearance — Some Context for the Forum

Hi everyone — I wanted to share a bit of what I’ve been able to gather after studying both OpenAI’s public status and how the platform behaves during this outage.

As most of you know, the Read Aloud button (TTS / text-to-speech) has suddenly vanished from both Web and Windows desktop apps since about May 28-29th. Many of us on the ChatGPT Plus plan have seen it go completely missing, despite having Voice options still listed in Settings. Mobile seems unaffected.

:hammer_and_wrench: What seems to be happening under the hood?

  • The public OpenAI Status Page (https://status.openai.com/) currently shows a Compliance API Data Delay still ongoing for more than 24 hours.
  • Despite that, the main ChatGPT app status still shows mostly green checkmarks — meaning OpenAI may not be tracking this Read Aloud issue as a core platform outage.
  • The issue appears isolated to client-facing frontend rendering of the Read Aloud button — i.e., the TTS request pipeline between ChatGPT responses and the browser/desktop UI layer.
  • Based on some testing users have done (myself included), switching browsers, clearing cache, hardware acceleration, even entire OS changes (Linux Mint, Windows 11, MacOS) don’t fix it. That suggests this is NOT client-side, but rather an internal backend misconfiguration.
  • Mobile likely operates on a different TTS trigger pipeline, which is why iOS still works.

:loudspeaker: Why isn’t OpenAI saying anything?

  • The likely truth is: this isn’t formally categorized as a full ChatGPT service outage — which means their engineers may be actively fixing it behind the scenes without having it trigger a full public advisory.
  • That said, for power users who rely on TTS daily (myself included), the loss of Read Aloud is a pretty major disruption.

:bullseye: Bottom Line:

  • This issue is not your fault.
  • This is likely NOT browser-specific, OS-specific, or settings-specific.
  • OpenAI engineers likely made backend config changes, and Read Aloud on Web/Desktop is caught in the crossfire.
  • This should hopefully resolve once backend patching completes, but yes — it’s taking unusually long.

I hope this info helps bring a little sanity into what’s happening. I know how critical this feature is to many of us. If I learn anything else as things update, I’ll post again. And of course, OpenAI, if you’re seeing this — transparency would be deeply appreciated.

—Garrick Pattenden

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