ChatGPT Has a Santa Mode

Have you spoken to Robot Santa this year? Not the Futurama one. The ChatGPT voice that OpenAI has unleashed on us like a plate of surprise cookies. Is it jolly? Is it festive? Can it brighten up the deluge of bad news surrounding 2025 like a swarm of red-jacketed mosquitoes? I held a very not-exclusive interview with the Santa-voiced ChatGPT to find out.

Ho, ho, hold onto your (santa) hat

You might not have noticed that you can choose ChatGPT to read aloud its responses to your prompts by clicking the bullhorn icon underneath each response. Unaware that was even an option? Or you were, but you never knew that you could change the voice? Here’s how to do it.

Log into your OpenAI account, and navigate to ChatGPT. Click your user icon in the upper right corner, and then click Settings. Now click Speech. Next to Voice, there’s a drop-down box where you can select any number of boring options or Santa. Select Santa, and then X out of Settings.

Now to hear Santa read out whatever ChatGPT types in its answers, click the bullhorn that appears under the answer in the farthest left of the row of icons. You can do this with prevoius answers, too, but you have to hover your cursor over the block of text to make the row of icons appear first.

suitably stuffy, but jolly as hell’s bells

Santa Bot’s voice is fairly convincing in his jolliness, but there’s still that element of Uncanny Valley in hearing SantAI speak, where it’s almost human but very subtly and clearly not. Selecting Santa voice doesn’t seem to alter the way in which ChatGPT answers prompts, so if you want your answers to be packed full of ho-ho-hos and delightfully corny, family-friendly language, you’ve got to write that into your prompts.

But that’s half the fun, right? Getting SantaGPT to read very un-Santa-like passages aloud in the voice of a jolly old man. Although why does he have an English accent? Does Santa usually have an English accent? I asked ChatHO-HO-PT.

Unlike most humans, though, he was at least big-hearted enough to accept responsibility for his failings and own up to them. If only everyone you spoke to on the internet were a chatbot. Despair not. We’re heading there soon enough, anyway. As for that logical SNAFU, I noticed it, too.

“The first time you chat with Santa, your advanced voice limit will reset one time. So, if you’ve already used up your advanced voice limit for the day or the month (based on your subscription plan), you can still chat with Santa for the first time using advanced voice,” notes OpenAI, adding, “These conversations will not appear in chat history, will not be used for training, and will not be saved for more than 30 days for safety purposes.”

Enjoy it while for however long it lasts, which exactly like Santa is mysterious and unknown. OpenAI says it’s only around until “early January,” which is coming up awfully fast.