Roadtripping with ChatGPT Voice Mode

On Saturday, my wife Jennifer and I drove to Blowing Rock, a quaint little town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We’d been there once before, but didn’t know the town well, so as we headed west I poked at the ChatGPT icon on my dashboard to give the app’s new CarPlay integration a try. I asked:

What activities would you recommend for a day trip to Blowing Rock, North Carolina?

What I got back was a short but good list of highlights including a hike, a visit to the Blowing Rock cliffside overlook, a few restaurants, a coffee shop, and some local shops. It was similar to a list of activities I’d looked up before we left using Claude. So far, so good.

I switched back to Apple Maps and was thinking I probably wouldn’t use ChatGPT in my car very often, but that it could come in handy for similar requests, when things got a little creepy. I explained to Jennifer that ChatGPT’s CarPlay feature was new, and I had been meaning to check it out all week. Then, just as I’d said I thought it had done a pretty good job, a voice interrupted. It was ChatGPT’s voice mode saying it was glad I liked it.

You see, just like a phone call doesn’t drop when you switch apps in CarPlay, neither does ChatGPT. I supposed I should have anticipated that the mic would remain live, but I didn’t. Nor did I notice the End button in the corner of the screen; I was driving, not studying the app’s UI.

I take it as a positive sign that I didn’t expect ChatGPT to follow me back to Apple Maps. I treat chatbots like I do any app. Give it some input, and you get an output. Close the app, and you’re done. It’s not my little robot buddy. It’s a tool like any other app.

Of course, that’s not how the voice modes of these chatbots are designed to work. Chats are meant to be an engaging back and forth. But having ChatGPT jump in on our one-on-one conversation while driving down the highway was too much. Suddenly, it felt like something else was in the car eavesdropping on us.

The experience was a good lesson in the balancing of utility and social norms around AI tools. Useful as they can be in some situations, their developers need to be more mindful of user expectations and provide better cues about how they work to avoid uncomfortable surprises. The recommendations we got from ChatGPT were good, but I also don’t expect it will get a second chance on our family road trips anytime soon.