Sam Altman may have Siri and Alexa in his sights after OpenAI filed a ‘digital voice assistant’ trademark application

• OpenAI filed a trademark application for a “voice engine” and to build “digital voice assistants.”
• The application came a day after Sam Altman hinted at other releases before the upcoming GPT-5.
• OpenAI also filed trademark applications in October for future models like GPT-6 and GPT-7.

Sam Altman might be striving to take on Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alex voice assistants.

OpenAI submitted a trademark application for the development of ‘digital voice assistants’ and a ‘voice engine,’ suggesting potential plans for launching a new product.

The application was submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday, following an interview with Sam Altman where he mentioned that OpenAI has ‘a lot of other important things to release’ prior to the launch of GPT-5.

Although those features may not materialize, it’s common for companies to file trademark applications for concepts that may never be realized. Nevertheless, there are expectations for OpenAI to unveil a ‘materially better’ upgrade of its ChatGPT model by mid-year.

During an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Altman stated, “We’re set to unveil an exceptional new model this year. Its exact name is yet to be determined. Over the next few months, we’ll introduce a variety of exciting releases-I believe they’ll be quite impressive.”

He further added, “Prior to discussing a model resembling GPT-5, whether named as such or slightly inferior or superior to expectations, I believe there are numerous other significant releases we need to focus first.”

Although the company doesn’t currently provide a digital voice assistant to its users, it does offer an API named TTS on its website, which converts speech to text. Additionally, it features a versatile speech recognition model called Whisper.

OpenAI also filed trademark applications for its future models, including GPT-6 and GPT-7 in October.

The application for GPT-6 including simulating conversations, sharing datasets for machine learning, predictive analytics, and examining algorithms capable of learning to analyze, classify, and respond to data exposure.

The trademark application for GPT-7 includes software utilizing artificial intelligence for music generation, converting text and data files into software code, and generating software code. Both applications are currently undergoing examination.

However, there’s no guarantee that the Patent Office will approve these trademarks. In February, it denied OpenAI’s efforts to trademark “GPT,” citing it as a “widely used acronym” that is “merely descriptive,” representing “generative pre-trained transformers.”

• Building digital voice assistants
• Voice and speech recognition, processing voice commands, and converting between text and speech
• Processing voice commands, and converting between text and speech
• automatic speech and voice recognition and generation
• Generating voice and audio outputs based on natural language prompts, text, speech, visual prompts, images, and/or video
• Generation of audio and/or voice in response to user prompts
• Machine learning-based natural language and speech processing
• Multilingual speech recognition, translation, and transcription
• Using artificial intelligence for automatic text-to-voice and text-to-audio conversion
• Development of voice service delivery

The pending review of the “voice engineer” which is pending a review from an examiner, intends to cover software for the following 10 areas:

Originally published at https://businessdor.com on March 23, 2024.