GoKawiilAI assistants like ChatGPT have been advancing at a steady rate, offering more capabilities, better accuracy and faster responses with each new model. Generative AI is not perfect, and you really shouldn't see it as an unquestionable source of information, but for those who have embraced the technology, it might be more convenient to switch to voice conversations instead of typing everything out. ChatGPT's original Voice Mode in 2023 relied on three separate systems to make it work. It would first convert your speech into text, generate an answer using a language model and then use a text-to-speech model to read it aloud.
The Advanced Voice Mode came after and featured a single multimodal model that improved things considerably. ChatGPT now ships with the GPT-Live model for handling voice conversations, and it is a major step up in terms of how natural the conversations feel. OpenAI calls it a "full-duplex" architecture that allows it to listen and speak at the same time. This is a gripe you might have had with the previous voice model, which could sometimes mistake a brief pause for the end of your turn and start replying before you had actually finished your sentence.
You will now occasionally hear ChatGPT vocalizing short acknowledgements like "mhmm" or "yeah" while you're speaking, similar to how a person might respond during a real conversation. GPT-Live can also pass on more complex tasks to other capable models, like GPT-5.5, in the background when a question requires reasoning or research.