ChatGPT can now talk and listen at the same time

ChatGPT's new voice actually holds a conversation

OpenAI replaced ChatGPT's old voice mode with GPT-Live, a new set of voice models that can listen and speak at the same time. That full-duplex design is the point. You can interrupt it, it can drop in small cues like mhmm and yeah, and it handles pauses without the awkward wait-your-turn feel of the old mode. When you ask something hard, it quietly hands the question to a stronger model in the background while keeping the conversation moving.

This matters because a lot of people already talk to ChatGPT. OpenAI says more than 150 million people use its voice and dictation features each week. GPT-Live also does live translation and shows quick visual cards for things like weather and stocks, with nine remastered voices to choose from.

The limits are real, though. It does not yet work with video or screen sharing. Full-duplex creates a new failure mode too: it can occasionally talk over you if it misreads a backchannel. And OpenAI notes the experience is uneven across languages, with possible accent or fluency gaps outside its strongest ones.

Read OpenAI's announcement and TechCrunch's write-up.

Let your browser do the multi-tab research

The tedious part of research is not reading, it is opening fifteen tabs and comparing them. AI browsers now handle that for you. In Perplexity's Comet, which is free across Mac, Windows, and mobile, open the assistant sidebar and give it a real task, like compare the pricing of the top three project management tools. It opens the pages, reads them, and returns a cited comparison you can check.

Here is the setup. Download Comet, sign in, open any page, click the assistant icon, and ask it to summarize the page or run a comparison. Its deeper research mode can even produce a simple deliverable like a spreadsheet. OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas offers a similar sidebar approach if you prefer that ecosystem.

The caution is important. These agent modes are still slow and imperfect on complex tasks, and letting a browser act on your behalf widens your security exposure. Both Comet and Atlas have faced documented prompt-injection concerns, so keep sensitive accounts out of agent sessions and verify anything that matters.

Explore Comet and ChatGPT Atlas.

Cloudflare is trying to make AI pay creators

Cloudflare, which sits in front of a large share of the web, made a bold move. Starting in mid-September, its default settings will block certain mixed-use AI crawlers from ad-carrying pages for new and free customers, unless the site owner opts out. It also turned its Pay Per Crawl idea into Pay Per Use, which aims to pay publishers when their content actually shapes an AI answer, not just when it gets fetched.

The backdrop is striking. Cloudflare's own data shows automated systems now make up 57.5% of web requests, edging out humans for the first time it has recorded. A large share of AI crawling is just re-fetching pages that have not changed. Cloudflare is pushing a new term for the era ahead, Answer Engine Optimization, the AI-age successor to SEO, where the goal is to be cited inside AI answers rather than ranked on a results page.

The trade-off is real for site owners. Because some crawlers serve multiple purposes, blocking AI training can also affect search visibility, so this is a decision to weigh, not a switch to flip blindly.

Read Cloudflare's post and TechCrunch's analysis.