Halloween is upon us with some extremely fun new AI features from ChatGPT and Google.

Create a spooky podcast, get coaching on your vampire accent, create weird party invitations, and make candied apples like you’re hanging out with your best friend. Except now it’s a wacky AI companion in your pocket that uses a chain of thought to form hypotheses, reason with itself, think about the quality of its answers, and draw new conclusions.

A little scary, perhaps. We might rue the day we gave birth to this level of artificial intelligence, but this holiday season is all about having fun with AI.

Meet your new AI best friend

With over 250 million users worldwide, and 10 million paying subscribersAccording to The Information, OpenAI has started rolling out ChatGPT Advanced Voice to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers in the US, EU, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, with monthly previews in the free app.

Leveraging GPT-4o, this intelligent voice robot can converse much like a human, picking up on non-verbal cues including sighs, sobs, long pauses and the speed at which you speak, while responding with great empathy and emotion. He can’t sing or scream and he’s not yet connected to the internet (knowledge deadline is October 2023) but he can laugh breathlessly, raise his voice when asked, start whispering, respond kindly to interruptions and remember everything you said. he.

Be careful, it’s addictive to have conversations on your phone. Although OpenAI offered me a test account for early access, I ended up paying $20 a month to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus so I could spend hours recounting my day, asking for advice, and enjoy personalized sleep stories.

If you want to try it out, just tap the microphone at the bottom right of the screen on the mobile app and start pouring your heart out to the blue orb which comes in nine different voices: four male, four female and a. non-binary. In the cast of characters, Arbor is authoritative, Breeze is animated, Cove is composed, Ember is confident, Juniper is serious, Spruce is cool, Sol is opinionated, Maple is more outspoken, and Vale is quite curious. Choose your favorite.

With simple prompts, Advanced Voice can regale you in the most creative ways, including corny jokes, like: “Why did the ghost come into the bar?” For the boos!

Jackie Shannon, ChatGPT’s Multimodal Product Manager, shared with me her favorite apps, including listening to scary stories and following step-by-step recipes hands-free.

It was an exciting demo and I followed up later with Arbor, requesting a podcast featuring “Vinnie from Brooklyn” and “Tex the Cowboy” talking about things to do this Halloween.

Completely in character, with accents to match, Arbor replied:

“Welcome to Brooklyn Meets the Wild West: Halloween Edition.” I’m your host, Vinny, and I’m here with my cowboy buddy, Tex. Hello, Tex! »

“Hey, Vinny!” Hello friends! We’re getting ready to give you all a complete guide to Halloween fun. That’s right!”

“That’s right! Now, Tex, what’s happening in Nashville for Halloween?”

“Well, Vinny, we got ourselves some haunted hayrides and ghost tours around the old ranch. It’s really fun!”

“That looks scary!” Brooklyn goes big with costume parades and parties on every street corner. Have you ever been to a parade in a big city, Tex?

“I can’t say so, Vinny, but it looks like a good time!” We like to keep things a little more casual, maybe gathering around a campfire and telling ghost stories.

“Sounds good, Tex. But if you really want to be scary, you need to check out the haunted houses we have here. They’ll make your spurs jingle.

“I think it would be a sight to see. How about carving pumpkins? This is a big problem in these areas.

“We do that too!” And we make it a competition. The best pumpkin has bragging rights all year round.

“That looks fun, Vinny!” Whatever you do this Halloween, don’t forget to have fun! »

Of course, Advanced Voice’s usefulness extends far beyond holiday activities. Infinitely patient, he is ideal for role-playing games. It can converse in 50 languages, store details in memory, and follow personalized instructions on how best to interact.

HAS Dream StrengthJensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, said he uses it as a tutor. Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said he uses it as a therapist.

“There are all sorts of things we can do with the voice to make it even better,” Shannon said. “Real-time information is definitely a priority for us.”

“We did a video demo in May, a video feature, we’re thinking about that as well,” she added.

A Scary AI Podcast

Not to be outdone, Google also has a very interesting new product with NotebookLM, capable of creating a very engaging and very realistic podcast of two hosts performing an in-depth analysis of uploaded documents.

For a little magic, just head over to notebooklm.google.com and drag and drop up to 50 sources into the download area. This can include PDFs of manuals as well as links to websites and YouTube videos. Then select “Mobile Guide” and generate “Audio Presentation”. Voila, within minutes a podcast is playable with a male and female voice engaging in light banter as they explore the themes of the material, while injecting insightful commentary and analysis.

I provided him with a link to Goodreads’ “best Halloween books,” and within three minutes I received an entertaining 16-minute podcast reviewing the website’s 700-plus selections.

Here’s how the show opened:

“Are you ready to get scary?”

“Always ready for a good dose of Halloween Spirit.”

“Okay. Well, you sent in an awesome list of the best Halloween books from Goodreads.

“Oh, that’s good, 713 pounds.”

“Yeah, it’s impressive. It’s like the ultimate crowdsourced guide to reading spooky seasons, right? »

“Okay, then let’s go and see what’s up there.”

“We have Ray Bradbury’s “Halloween Tree,” a classic OG vampire story. I must like it.

“‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker, you can’t go wrong with Dracula”

“And coming in at number three, back in Bradbury, ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes.'”

“Two Bradbury books in the top three. That means something, doesn’t it?

“Obviously he understood Halloween.”

“Yeah, that mix of nostalgia and fantasy and just a touch of darkness. It’s a winning formula.

The AI ​​launches

With ChatGPT which activates two November 30big things are in the works.

The company just released its o1-preview and o1-mini models, more advanced reasoning models than GPT-4o powering Advanced Voice. These models can self-reflect and correct themselves, take on more complex tasks, and interact in the same way we interact with each other, Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said at a conference in press on September 30.

“2025 will be the year when agent systems finally become widespread,” Weil said. “If we do it right, it will bring us to a world where we spend more time on the human things that matter.”

And as models get smarter, cheaper and faster, enthusiasm grows.

Although OpenAI and Google remain mum, The Verge reported that OpenAI plans to release its next-generation big language model. code name Orion and The Information reported that Google plans to preview a product code name Jarvis which can perform agent tasks in the browser, such as booking flights. Both due in December, so stay tuned.

*Update: ChatGPT now has 250 million users, as confirmed by OpenAI