ChatGPT and Whisper APIs want to help businesses too, and at cheaper rates. What we know so far

If you liked ChatGPT and Whisper and thought these cutting-edge technologies can make your businesses better, you can now integrate them with your websites, apps, products, and services.

ChatGPT chatbot by OpenAI, which took the world by storm since its launch in November last year, is now available on API (Application Programming Interface), along with Whisper.

After ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, OpenAI on Wednesday (March 1) launched the Whisper API, a hosted version of the open-source Whisper speech-to-text model that the company released in September last year.

The service would let businesses access the chatbot technology and other AI systems created by OpenAI, and integrate it with their own software.

OpenAI's statement

President & Co-Founder of OpenAI, Greg Brockman said that ChatGPT and Whisper models are now available on their API, giving developers access to cutting-edge language (not just chat!) and speech-to-text capabilities.

"Developers can now use our open-source Whisper large-v2 model in the API with much faster and cost-effective results. ChatGPT API users can expect continuous model improvements and the option to choose dedicated capacity for deeper control over the models," the statement read.

 

What is Whisper?

Whisper, which was first introduced by OpenAI in September last year, is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.

It also enables transcription in multiple languages and translation from those languages into English.

Companies already using ChatGPT and Whisper APIs

Companies like Snap Inc, the creator of Snapchat, Quizlet, Instacart, Shopify, and Speak are already using OpenAI's API.

Snapchat, introduced My AI for Snapchat+ this week. It offers the users a friendly, customizable chatbot at their fingertips that offers recommendations, and can even write a haiku for friends in seconds.

Quizlet, a learning platform with more than 60 million students, has worked with OpenAI for the last three years, leveraging GPT-3 across multiple use cases, including vocabulary learning and practice tests. Quizlet is now introducing Q-Chat, a fully-adaptive AI tutor that engages students with adaptive questions.

Instacart uses ChatGPT alongside its own AI and product data from its 75,000+ retail partner store locations to help customers discover ideas for open-ended shopping goals, such as asking how to make a certain dish or what's healthy and what's not. Instacart plans to launch "Ask Instacart" later this year.

Speak is an AI-powered language learning app, which has been using the Whisper API to power a new AI speaking companion product. Whisper's human-level accuracy for language learners of every level unlocks open-ended conversational practice and highly accurate feedback.

The technology

The company has now made the large-v2 model available through its API, which gives on-demand access priced at $0.006/ minute. Whisper API is available through OpenAI's transcriptions (transcribes in the source language) or translations (transcribes into English) endpoints, and accepts a variety of formats (m4a, mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpga, wav, webm).

Traditionally, GPT models consume unstructured text, represented to the model as a sequence of "tokens." ChatGPT models instead consume a sequence of messages together with metadata.

Way cheaper

The ChatGPT model the OPenAI released, gpt-3.5-turbo, is the same model used in the ChatGPT product. It is priced at $0.002 per 1k tokens, which is 10x cheaper than than their existing GPT-3.5 models.

"Through a series of system-wide optimizations, we've achieved 90% cost reduction for ChatGPT since December and we're now passing through those savings to API users," company's Co-Founder Greg Brockman said.

 

ChatGPT upgrades

Open AI said that developers who use the gpt-3.5-turbo model will always get their recommended stable model, while still having the flexibility to opt for a specific model version.

"For example, today we're releasing gpt-3.5-turbo-0301, which will be supported through at least June 1st, and we'll update gpt-3.5-turbo to a new stable release in April. The models page will provide switchover updates," the company said.