On April 1st, OpenAI announced that from now on, users will be allowed to use ChatGPT without registering or logging in.

OpenAI states that over 100 million people in 185 countries/regions currently use ChatGPT every week to "learn new knowledge, seek creative inspiration, and obtain answers to questions."

The company further stated that it is gradually introducing registration free features and has introduced additional content protection measures for users who have not created accounts, such as blocking prompts and generating a wider range of categories.

OpenAI reminds that the company may use the information provided by users to ChatGPT to improve its model, but users (regardless of whether they have created an account) can choose to disable this feature.

However, OpenAI still recommends that you consider creating an account because creating an account has many benefits, including the ability to save and view chat history, share chats, unlock voice conversations, and customize commands, among other additional features.

A few days ago, OpenAI just released a new artificial intelligence tool - Voice Engine. This tool will generate natural speech that is very similar to the original speaker through user text input and a single 15 second audio sample.

OpenAI hopes to provide reading assistance, translate video and podcast content, support non-linguistic groups, and help patients with sudden or degenerative speech disorders recover their voices through the Voice Engine.

There is a view that OpenAI's move is aimed at gaining traffic and consolidating ChatGPT's position in chatbots.

According to data analysis company Similarweb, ChatGPT's growth rate has slowed down since May 2023 (when its network traffic reached a peak of 1.8 billion).

Although ChatGPT is still the most well-known chatbot product, with the rise of multiple chatbots such as Google's Gemini, xAI's Grok, and Aerospace's Claude, ChatGPT's traffic is gradually being divided. This may be an important reason why OpenAI decided to open up.

In addition, there are views that this may be a prelude to OpenAI's competition with Google.Because with the opening of the registration-free feature, it is now as easy for the public to use ChatGPT as it is to use search engines such as Google.