Nearly two years since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I had my first true "wow” moment from the artificial intelligence frenzy.

Granted, I’ve been impressed by how chatbots can generate helpful responses and synthesize information. I’ve amused myself with some of the images I’ve created with various applications. But mostly I’ve approached AI with a healthy dose of skepticism, often seeing more hype than substance and still finding it glaringly obvious when I am interacting with a computer and not a human.

Much of that changed when I spent the recently playing around with ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode update. The feature began rolling out to paid subscribers the other month, after initial delays over potential safety issues. And recently, OpenAI said it was launching its voice assistant to businesses and developers to use in their own applications.