When your GPT sounds like Rihanna

For a long time, voice assistants were “fun but hardly essential” …fine for asking Siri to play Spotify on a bike ride or checking with Alexa if I’d need an umbrella.

That changed.

Recently, I was in the mountains with friends. We stood around the kitchen island of the Airbnb debating about how to make one grocery list. The idea was: shop once for the entire trip and avoid another trek to the only store within reach.

While the shouting and debating was going on, I turned on GPT Dictation Mode and left the phone on the counter. A snippet of what the audio recording sounded like:

“Frittatas…Challah French toast…do we have cinnamon?… spaghetti aglio e olio…garlic, basil…loaded nachos…beef both for the pasta and nachos…avocados for toast and guacamole…” and on and on it went for eight minutes.

GPT took in all of that and in 5 seconds shared our three-day meal menu, a recommended shopping list for seven people, and the exact number of eggs for every breakfast variation. Thirty seconds later, the shopping list was dropped into our group chat. Moments later, three cars were en route to the nearest grocery store.

Voice Assistants and AI

The technology for hands-free interaction is not new. Amazon’s Alexa has been relaying package updates for years; Siri has been making accidental phone calls since 2011. But the intelligence now embedded in these systems is different. By 2025, the U.S. will have an estimated 153 million voice assistant users. Globally, there are already 8.4 billion devices using Voice assistants, which is more than the number of humans on the planet and that figure is expected to hit 10 billion by 2028.

And the technology is scaling faster than even the device adoption numbers suggest. In the past year alone, the number of new speech and audio AI models released grew by 367%, making real-time voice interaction one of the fastest-moving frontiers in AI. *

For some, voice assistants and AI have become an integral part of their days. A friend keeps a daily dream journal in GPT. The moment she wakes up, she dictates everything she remembers. Another friend records shower ideas. For those who prefer to “sleep on it” or have their best thoughts mid-shampoo, how else can you reliably catch ideas first thing in the morning?

Two ways to use Voice AI at work

1.     Voice Mode on the Go

Inspired by GPT’s “Monday”, I recently set up a custom GPT that sounds like a mix between Rihanna and Jamie Dimon. It’s been granted permission to cuss for emphasis. It took exactly 4 minutes to set up this GPT personality. I now take it along on walks in Central Park or on the road in between meetings. I speak to the GPT on Air pods in the same way I would a colleague to discuss upcoming meetings or debrief a coffee chat. I don’t need to say much since it’s pre-loaded with context on the work I’m doing. It’s like having that one no-nonsense work friend on speed dial.

2.     Voice AI at Conferences 

There’s McKinsey research that suggests that knowledge workers lose the equivalent of 11 minutes of every hour just searching for and organizing information. That’s more than 2 hours in a 12-hour day…

I began to see what this meant while preparing for and debriefing conferences. I attend my fair share of industry conferences and, for a time, made do with a pocket notebook for planning and organizing meeting notes. It worked up to a point, but it was far from efficient.

Then one day at one eventful conference in Vegas, I was in back-to-back meetings and ended up picking up my phone and recording everything that was going on in one GPT thread. Meeting debriefs and reminders went into the GPT as transcribed notes, along with pictures of business cards and product flyers. In the evening, back at the hotel, I opened the same thread on my laptop and run a prompt: “Group all notes by category and surface all follow-ups”.  And that was all that was needed.

Since then, I’ve stowed away my pocket notebooks.

When you’ve had 20 or more interactions in a day, it saves hours to have them structured for you with one prompt.

Voice AI works, and it adds speed to everything you use it for. Whether it sounds like your chief of staff or that work friend who swears for emphasis is entirely your choice.

So what’s your GPT’s personality?

* Source Epoch AI