OpenAI’s official ChatGPT app on Android will no longer listen to your conversations when the app is pushed in the background. The latest update adds a new toggle to disable background listening. ChatGPT will only respond to your voice queries when the app is active.
ChatGPT App Now Gives You More Control Over Voice Conversations
ChatGPT app on Android allows users to have real-time voice conversations with the chatbot. The app previously allowed users to continue to voice chat when it was pushed in the background, or even when they turned off their smartphone’s screen. Although this feature was intended to offer contextual responses and uninterrupted conversations, it posed a privacy risk for some users who forgot to disable the voice chat manually.
Incidents like Scarlett Johansson’s morphed voice can be one of the reasons why OpenAI felt the need to disable background conversations.
A new toggle to disable background conversations completely will be available under Settings > Voice > Background Conversations. By default, this toggle is disabled with the latest update of the ChatGPT app. Hence, users will not have to worry about the chatbot listening to them accidentally.
This new privacy-focused toggle arrived on the ChatGPT shortly after the announcement of OpenAI’s latest GPT-4o AI model. It introduces powerful voice translation features across multiple languages. This new model is also faster and more efficient than the basic GPT-3.5. Most importantly, OpenAI decided to provide GPT-4o to all users for free. Paying subscribers have the incentive of higher daily usage limits.
ChatGPT is undisputedly the most popular AI chatbot in the market, compared to its competition like Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity AI, Meta AI, etc. Due to constant high demand, the chatbot recently went offline for a few hours creating a panic among millions of users. It was shortly restored to full functionality. However, this incident reflects how AI chatbots have started to become an integral part of our internet usage.
