Credit: Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority
- ChatGPT’s smartphone app will no longer continue listening if you start a voice conversation and switch to a different app or lock your device.
- A new “Background Conversation” toggle now resides in the smartphone app’s settings menu, but it’s disabled by default.
- The toggle arrives just days ahead of OpenAI’s GPT-4o voice update, which adds emotion and other capabilities to the feature.
ChatGPT’s smartphone app has quietly added a new toggle that allows users to enable or disable background listening for voice conversations. When the feature was released late last year, ChatGPT would always continue listening even if you locked your smartphone or switched to a different app. Put simply, it behaved more like a phone call, unlike Google Assistant which only pops up momentarily to listen for a singular question or command.
Earlier this month, we spotted a new “Background Conversation” toggle hidden in the 1.2024.151 beta version of the ChatGPT app. As the label suggests, it allows users to control the above behavior.