OpenAI pauses Sky’s voice in ChatGPT for resembling Scarlett Johannson’s

May 20. (Portaltic/EP) –

OpenAI has decided to temporarily stop the use of the ChatGPT voice known as Sky because it resembles that of the actress Scarlett Johannson, and has denied that he tries to imitate her, while explaining the process they followed to select the five voices for this ‘chatbot’ feature.

With support for voice chat in ChatGPT, OpenAI offered users the ability to choose between five voices for your interactions with this ‘chatbot’, each of them with “its own tone and distinctive character”, which are called Breeze, Cove, Juniper, Sky and Ember.

Now the company has decided pause using Sky because reminiscent of Scarlett Johannson’s voice, while addressing this issue, as confirmed in your X profile (former Twitter). She has also taken the opportunity to ensure that Sky’s voice is not an imitation of the interpreter, but that she “belongs to a different professional actress who uses her own natural voice.”

We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky. We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them.

Read more about how we chose these voices: https://t.co/R8wwZjU36L

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) May 20, 2024

The choice of these people who give voice to the ‘chatbot’ required five months of work with “professional voice actors, talent agencies, casting directors and industry advisors”, with the goal of finding a group of people who had diverse origins or who spoke different languages, who had a timeless voice, who inspired confidence and was natural and easy to listen to.

Voice chat has been available since September last year for the mobile version (iOS and Android) ChatGPT with large language models GPT 3.5 and GPT 4, waiting for OpenAI to also implement it in GPT-4o in the coming weeks.