Is OpenAI's voice assistant for ChatGPT-4o better than Siri and Alexa?

Sam Altman's OpenAI unveiled its latest ChatGPT iteration on Monday and tech experts think it may be better than Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

Open AI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati showed off the company's new AI model, ChatGPT-4o, and its new voice chat assistant which is supposed to be able to have a natural back-and-forth conversation with users.

In a Business Insider report, Katie Notopoulos, the outlet's senior correspondent covering technology and culture, compared ChatGPT-4o’s voice assistant to Siri and Alexa and was quite impressed by the feature.

'Lots of emotion'

According to Notopoulos, ChatGPT-4o's voice assistant speaks in a conversational way with "lots of emotion".

She said that the voice chat assistant has a female voice and can feign excitement, friendliness, or even sarcasm.

Meanwhile, Siri doesn’t handle naturally flowing conversations, which you may be well aware of it if you've ever used it. 

It can't understand users or often can’t really complete a command. Alexa has a similar problem.

In the report, Notopoulos, who uses Alexa, wrote that Amazon's voice assistant feels "stupid" in comparison to generative AI chatbots, being "incapable of doing straightforward things like playing a specific album on Spotify instead of just an artist playlist."

No need of wake commands

One of the things that impressed the tech expert was that you don't need to use "wake words" or precise commands like "Hey Siri!" or "Alexa!" as you do with Apple or Amazon's assistant.

The decade-old Siri, despite being helpful for many tasks, is also extremely limited.