Advanced Voice
I’ve beaten this topic like a cardboard drum on Substack. Even as I sit here thinking about telling the story of how it’s changed my life, I have trouble putting this in context so people understand the significance. I feel like I’m back in 2003 when I was making the same case for Bluetooth, and everyone—and I do mean 99% of the people I talked to back then—couldn’t understand why it was so important. I remember many hours of feeling like I wasn’t making my point, or that I was going crazy trying to explain why it mattered so much. Bluetooth was not at all a household name, and neither is GPT-4’s Advanced Voice.
The problem with Bluetooth was that people kept lumping it in with what they knew, such as 900 MHz headphones that sounded like crap, or they thought it was just another radio product. They think Advanced Voice is just another voice command prompt, like when you pick up the phone and want to get your credit card balance.
I was troubleshooting the sudden failure of my Sony A7SIII camera and lens, and it did an outstanding job of walking through step-by-step solutions as if I were sitting next to someone in tech support who had a brain north of a radish.
Advanced Voice began the whole troubleshooting process with three firmware updates in sequence that needed to be done: one camera driver, one restart in safe mode, and changes to root permissions on my laptop. This involved USB workarounds due to the limitations of earlier firmware, and every step was clear, complete with me asking clarifying questions. It was far better than any call I’ve ever had with anyone live. It knew exactly what my laptop screen looked like with each step without seeing it. It didn’t hang up on me, forget where we left off, or put me on hold. Every step was clear and concise.
When we hit a dead end, it suggested I call Sony tech support for their suggestions. That was the usual horrible experience I was expecting, and their solution was to send it in with a $600+ minimum repair charge to one of their two contracted repair centers on the East Coast.
I got back on Advanced Voice after hitting my use limit the night before, and it suggested I first take it to a camera store and confirm if it was the lens or the body, then make the decision from there. Of course, Sony never made the same suggestion; they were happy to assume it was the body that failed.
Sure enough, after testing the lens on a new body and a new lens on my camera body, it was clearly the lens that failed. It was also much cheaper to send it in, and it ultimately saved me the initial $600. With shipping, it would have been over $700, and that was the minimum charge. The camera store thinks it will be about a $200 repair in the end, but they won’t know until their repair center gets into it.
Think of the implications today. This was about two hours of Advanced Voice support steps that Sony didn’t pay for, but I did via my ChatGPT $20-per-month subscription.
Still inquisitive about what it could do, I asked Advanced Voice about my John Deere 1025R tractor recall. It said it didn’t have information because GPT-4 is only current to October 2023. The recall occurred only recently.
It got way crazier. I asked Advanced Voice if it could stop talking to me like it was a Disney Park tour guide, and it said yes, it could be more concise.