There’s an upgraded AI tool in town, and it’s pretty sweet. On May 14, OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-4o (“o” stands for “omni”), their latest chatbot. It has a ton of new features and will be available to everyone at no cost, including those who have been using version 3.5 for free.
New Features
What makes ChatGPT-4o an “omni” tool is that it will accept any combination of text, audio, and image as input and then can create any combination of text, audio, and image as an output. Here are just a few of the amazing new abilities 4o has:
- Performance: It’s faster, more than two times faster while performing at a higher level.
- Voice: It has the ability to speak in a natural dialogue with real-time conversational speech recognition without any time delay (although so many people tried it out when it was announced that it overwhelmed the system). Natural dialogue means that it can listen and understand when you speak to it, eliminating the need for text input, and it can speak back to you. (Some users have said the voice GPT-4o speaks in reminds them of the AI character Samantha from the movie “Her.”) It can also recognize emotion from your voice.
- Translation: It offers support in multiple languages with real-time translation. That means you can talk in one language and the other person can hear in their own language in real time. It can also translate text if you point your camera at it.
- Visuals: It has the ability to detect emotions from facial expressions. If you show it a picture, graphic, chart, or diagram, it can recognize it and interact with you about it.
How to Access
Right now, free users of ChatGPT-3 will be able to access GPT-4 at no charge. This provides more processing power and greater capabilities such as:
- Better understanding of natural language (making it easier for students to work with it)
- The ability to recognize and work with images
- Handling more complicated tasks such as multi-layered prompts
- Being able to browse the internet
- More logical output
- Easily creating GPTs that run specific tasks for you without any programming knowledge
For Plus (paid) users, text mode in ChatGPT-4o is already available. When you log in, it will automatically ask if you want to use 4o. The new voice mode will be available in the coming weeks, offered first to Plus users with plans to expand availability to free users. A new desktop app for macOS will also be launched.
You can switch between the different versions of ChatGPT simply by clicking on the dropdown menu, as shown below.
What This Means for Education
For students who use the current free version of ChatGPT, this update to ChatGPT-4 at no cost will provide a stronger and more powerful tool with additional features, helping to level the digital divide. For educators, the ways to use ChatGPT-4o are almost infinite. Besides its use in developing curriculum resources such as lesson plans, rubrics, assessments, text passages, and more, the simple fact that it is so much faster will save even more time. And when the voice feature is implemented, being able to tell it what you need instead of having to type it in will also be a time saver, something critical for overworked teachers and administrators.
If you’d like to learn more about how to integrate ChatGPT into your professional life and with your students, check out the TCEA online course ChatGPT for Educators. For just $39, you can master this amazing chatbot, earn 12 CPE hours, and receive a digital certificate and badge.
