Getty Images/Fahmi Ruddin Hidayat
AI is listening — now more than ever.
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OpenAI announced in an X post on Thursday that users of ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Edu can now record audio by simply pressing a button. Record mode, the Otter.ai-like meeting transcription feature, was initially released through the ChatGPT MacOS desktop app earlier this month.
What is Record mode?
The feature allows you to record meetings and voice notes, just as you would through the iPhone Voice Memos recorder or third-party tools such as Otter.ai. ChatGPT will then convert the audio into a summarized transcript, which is saved as a canvas in your chat history. You can also prompt the chatbot to convert the transcripts into different kinds of outputs, including personalized emails and computer code.
As OpenAI notes on its website, consent laws concerning the recording of others vary depending on geographical location. New York, for example, is a “one-party” consent state, meaning that only one person (including the person operating the recording device) needs to consent to a conversation being recorded for it to be legal. In other states, like California and Pennsylvania, at least two parties need to consent to being recorded.
How to access Record mode
First, check and follow your local consent laws before recording anyone else’s voice.
Next, make sure ChatGPT has access to your device’s microphone. Then simply click the “Record” button at the bottom of the chatbot’s user interface. It will transcribe as you speak, and you can speak in natural language, just as you would if you were typing up a text prompt for the chatbot.
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When you’re done, click “Send.” This will open a summary of the recorded speech in a separate canvas page. You can then manually edit the text or prompt ChatGPT to make any adjustments or convert the content to another format.
Recordings can extend up to two hours (120 minutes), after which point they’ll automatically stop and start converting into text summaries. OpenAI notes that record mode currently works best for English, but its capabilities in other languages are improving.
Data privacy considerations
According to OpenAI’s website, all audio recordings are deleted immediately after they’re converted into transcripts. The company also states that no audio files from ChatGPT customers are used for model training.
However, if you have not disabled the “Improve the model for everyone” feature in your ChatGPT user settings, then the transcripts and canvases that you create through the record feature may be used by OpenAI to train its models. To learn more about disabling this feature, click here.
Users of ChatGPT Enterprise, Team, and Edu can disable record mode by clicking “Workplace Controls” in settings.
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