Microsoft is a big proponent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT product and has already embedded it in Bing and Edge as well as Skype. The most recent update to Windows 11 brings ChatGPT to the search box in the OS’ task bar too. This is only the beginning – OpenAI just announced that ChatGPT and Whisper are available to developers through its APIs.
After some extensive optimizations, using ChatGPT costs 90% less than it did in December. This means that the gtp-3.5-turbo model (which powers the ChatGPT you may have used) now costs $0.002 per 1,000 tokens. To put it another way, you can get 500K tokens for a dollar (ChatGPT doesn’t work on single characters, a token is more similar to a vowel).
This new price makes it much cheaper for companies to build their own chat bot. But ChatGPT works with text, what if a company wants its bot to answer to voice commands? That’s where Whisper comes in – this model can transcribe speech into text at a cost of $0.006 a minute (i.e. $1 for 2 hours 45 minutes).
Not only does Whisper understand 99 languages, it can also provide an English translation of what was said. This has a lot of potential to disrupt Siri and Google Assistant, which can only handle a few languages.
Companies can use OpenAI’s APIs to build new chat bots and some already have, Microsoft isn’t alone. Here are a few examples.
Snapchat introduced My AI for Snapchat+ this week. This bot can offer recommendations, such as a recipe for dinner or plan a hiking trip for you. And you can even ask it to write you a haiku.
Instacart also launched a ChatGPT based bot that can help customers by suggesting recipes and automatically creating the shopping list that is needed for them.
Similarly, Shopify’s Shop app can help users navigate products and brands and pick things out as if they had a personal shopping assistant.
ChatGPT is seeing adoption in learning apps as well. Quizlet introduced Q-Chat, a “fully adaptive AI tutor”. It is more flexible than fixed quizzes in text books, which have to cater to all students, this one adapt to your needs.
Speak is the fastest-growing English app in South Korea and it showcases Whisper as it helps locals learn to speak the language. Speak is expanding to new markets too.
You can find out more about the pricing of ChatGPT APIs here. Dedicated instances are available too for companies that want a more reliable experience (otherwise the model runs on a shared instance whose performance will vary depending on server load).
