Does anyone actually use ChatGPT’s voice mode? It seems technically impressive, but when I try using it, it feels… deeply uncomfortable talking to a machine like you would a person.

Treating it like you would a person feels silly: It’s not a person, it doesn’t have any life experience or anything interesting to say, it doesn’t have real opinions or anything worth talking about that isn’t a direct answer to your question. So having a “conversation” with it feels like I’m doing role-playing with a computer. And it gets into “weird” territory, fast.

But if you treat it like you would an LLM chatbot, to get specific answers to questions, or to explain something to you, it’s so. much. worse than having the answer on a screen for me to skim and reference directly. Either the answer is too brief to be helpful, or too long and it’s talking forever and I have to make it stop. I suppose certain highly specific questions that have brief and concise answers, it may be good at?

Maybe I just haven’t found the right use case for it yet. Or maybe my discomfort is just my introversion coming through, and normal people don’t have this problem.

I've talked to ChatGPT in the car whilst driving to learn various topics. It easier to talk than type and the real time verbal feedback helps with the learning.

It is a bit strange, the outputs are the result of complex mathematical computations and math doesn't have feelings, but it does occasionally generate genuinely useful outputs.

If you're aware that you are talking to a bot, then I see no problem with it. The problem is the dissonance people get talking to an AI like its real.

> it feels… deeply uncomfortable talking to a machine like you would a person.

That's why the form factor should be a wand. Flourish it to activate, and speak your spell.