>The best feature is that it can delegate questions out to GPT-5.5 in the background, so you're no longer restricted to a voice model that's several years behind the frontier.

Ahh, this makes sense. I was wondering when they would start doing this. I stopped using voice mode all together because it was frustrating talking to a dumb AI, when most of the time I discuss things with Opus 4.8 or gpt 5.5.

I was working on a phone call agent recently, and thought about doing this. It makes sense

Is it responsive to personality settings? I actively don't want fake AI girlfriend, but I do get a ton of value out of voice mode. Looking forward to trying this but hoping it's not a creepy overdone mess (like Sesame). Expectations are they'll keep doubling down on fake AI girlfriend approach because the thing I want probably wouldn't drive engagement anywhere nearly as well

I highly recommend simply enjoying the walk.

> "The best feature is that it can delegate questions out to GPT-5.5 in the background, so you're no longer restricted to a voice model that's several years behind the frontier."

Wow. That's exactly what I hoped they would do.

This issue has held me back from using ChatGPT's voice mode as much as I otherwise would have, because I also use it for brainstorming while commuting, exercising, etc., and don't want it to feel stuck in the past.

> I did report a fun bug with it though: it was interrupting me and laughing at my (not really intended as) jokes while I was still talking! They seem to have clamped that behavior down thankfully, it felt a bit rude and condescending.

Some times I'm still amazed that AI "gets" humour much more effectively than the character of Data did before his emotion chip, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4VZ5kQIdV0

Other times I'm amazed in the opposite way, that the script writers cover basically the same talking points about the character as we have today about LLMs, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBJCYHwyZhw

I love the UX of voice mode. I’ve always hated voice models.

Gemini’s being particularly egregious (always ending in some deranged question, can not reliably be prompted away) prompted me to build my own client for my real harness that simply does STT -> model -> TTS (both being independently useful).

I guess I see some value in a model responding quickly and with more nuance, but it’s not much. I can wait for it to finish. I’d much rather have it be actually useful. I’m not looking for a digital friend.

The delegation feature lets me see some value in a voice model for orchestration type features. But in either case, I don’t really like (or understand why others would like) talking to a model with different features and quirks just because I’m using a different medium to communicate over.

Is it a dumb-down version of GPT like the current voice model? At least in french, I find the current GPT voice mode to be useless, to the point I only use the dication mode. I would ask a question and it would answer something along "That's a interesting question. I can help you with that. Anything you want to know about X?" I would ask again and it would answer the same kind of non answer.

Does it have full access to your chat history, project files, etc? That's the biggest limitation I have with voice mode right now, if I ask it about something I chatted about before (even in the same conversation) it has zero recollection of it.

I should give these voice models another try.

I have friends who have brainstormed with an LLM (voice chat) for 10-30 minutes, and reported very positive experiences.

When I speak to one - while I'm impressed at how far they've progressed - the LLM just doesn't talk like someone I'd want to discuss a technical problem with (the way I would with a human).

(And my friends aren't even using a custom prompt - some of them are just talking to the default Gemini on their phone!)

But does it generate good pelicans?

Cool, was this conversation through the chatgpt app?

Thank you for testing and the feedback Simon!

Have you compared it to grok in teslas?

About 2 years ago I used to have conversations with GPT while walking the dog. It really emphasized the need to think before you speak, but you had to think fast before it hung up on you.

Sam, is that you?

Most of what AI does is already in wrong direction. Not just human-to-human interaction, it took away thinking, creative work, sensory perception (glasses) and responses. People call it as helping humans, but I call it as sucking away the "human-ness" from humans.

After the damage is done, the mega corps would simply shrug and will say "Well, we were just responding to our business competition" The business knows no human-ness, because it is not a human. Businesses and machines are creatures that see humans as their fodder. And humans created these, assuming it is progress, to have businesses and machines. We call it progress because it required our mind power and it helped us to dominate other species. Dolphins are laughing at us.

> This is the opposite direction AI should be going. Human relationships are the most valuable thing we have, and so, naturally, technology seeks to intermediate and now replace them.

Valid, but, I think, you conflate two separate things.

AI voice mode as a human socialization/conversation replacement? Cringe in my book, fully in agreement with you. Though my opinion on that aspect remains the same, regardless of whether it is done through text or voice.

AI voice mode as an alternative interface to interact with AI-as-a-tool? Great idea imo. There were a few instances where I was either too tired to type or wanted to brainstorm things in more of a freeform mode, for which a well-working voice mode would have been great.

Naturally, the current distinction between AI-as-a-personality and AI-as-a-tool exists purely on the user's end. All I know is that I want the latter a lot, and if some people want to use it for the former purpose, that's not my problem. Sadly, I think that it will be judged more on how an average person decides to use it (i.e., in the most degenerate/reductionist ways possible), as opposed to being judged on the merits of what it can actually be used for by someone who just treats it as a tool.

Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings. Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.

I disagree. Fluid natural conversational AI is far more productive than any other interface for working with LLMs. Although I suppose you could make the argument that it should be more... Robotic like. Like in StarTrek. Which, is honestly probably better for work, too. A "get shit done" mode, of pure, cold, efficiency.

Isn’t voice I difference in degree rather than in kind? I definitely talk to AI as if it were human (one might say the UX of AI is to emulate a human). And a large portion of my interaction with humans is via text, for example, this post!

Every new release I'm convinced we are just realizing the Knowledge Navigator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0

I see it more as a way technology could be abused rather than an inherent flaw in the technology itself. If you start to replace human interaction with chatbot interaction, that's bad, but there's nothing wrong with using a human-like chatbot in moderation. So many other types of technology are fine in moderation but can be abused in a human-interaction-replacing way: television, social media, video games, etc.

But a lot of humans can't engage in meaningful technical conversations... So why not use a tool for that?

Just give it a scifi robot voice and pretend you're on a spaceship

Aren't they already very cognizant of handwringing like yours? Their article mentions various safeguards and actively steering the model away from being emotional companions and so on. It's a far cry from the OpenAI two years ago or whenever it was when they were entertaining the idea of allowing/enabling adult conversations with their models.

I personally think this is a moralistic regulatory overreach. And they definitely do that due to political pressure too, since there are various bills around the world in various legislatures that want to regulate AIs giving useful advice and being too personal to talk to.

So you can rest assured, I think, at least in that regard. The AI disempowerment will come to us anyway, just in a more sanitized corporate form.

How would talking to an AI as if it were not human sound? You can probably set your system prompt to insert “beep boop” between sentences and make it refer to itself as “Cybertron9000 Personal Computing Device” if that’s what you like. Is that an improvement? Or are you against voice computer interfaces altogether?

Again, we're paying for the fact that Sam Altman didn't understand the movie her

From one perspective, AI serves as a wedge that separates those who want human culture from those who want machine culture.

Where do you draw the line on how good human-machine interfaces should be? I'm sure this model could be a convenience for many, and while it may be social for some, I am not sure it would substitute existing human interaction for those users.

Besides, I do not think there is anything inherently immoral with not being social, or not having the ability to be. Consider for example people who do not naturally have the social network to interact with people they want to (e.g. some gifted children).

I am not convinced this model has enough empathy to satisfy most users on an emotional level. A bond is not merely an exchange of words, but prolonged and deep contemplation of the other being. We cannot introspect into these machines, and they certainly cannot yet do the same to us.

> This is the opposite direction AI should be going.

There is no moral obligation, in any domain, to refuse to make a product that adults, with full informed consent, find useful and purchase. Who are you to say you know better than the market?

There's a tiktok of Sam Altman reacting to a viral clip of someone using Voice to time themselves on a mile run (it hilariously failed).

Sam's reaction was "Yea, it doesn't have access to tools like a timer. It's a known issue. Should be coming in about a year"

Edit: here's the clip: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Py2YgJe8fqQ

I could see it relating to tools having unpredictable latency but if they already do background hand off to 5.5 then it seems like they could just enable it within that context.

I’ve been using gpt-realtime-1 for my personal assistant that runs my company and plans my day. And it works pretty well, even makes tool calls and all that.

But the multi modal stuff has resulted in a lot of debugging with weird events and message and audio sequences having race conditions, but overall it is pretty awesome.

Looking forward to moving to this model later today and will chime back in with results.

> I don’t really get it - NONE of the frontier assistants can use tools / connectors while in voice mode - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok.

Is that true? I have a friend who often brainstorms with Gemini (I think just on an Android phone), and he has it actually do stuff related to the conversation (including adding content to notes).

In any case, you can always vibe code one with pi!

A big part of this announcement does seem to be _delegation_ in the background; they give the example of web search but that could be any tool. I haven't tried it yet either but sounds like they've found a reasonable UX that mixes that sort of high-and-variable latency tool calling (potentially with agentic loops) with a continuously speaking live voice.

Last I tried this is exposed via their sdk and can be built.

This is not true. Realtime 2 can use tools.

Because they take too long to run, and have an unpredictable latency and success rate. Seeing loading spinners and error messages in a visual interface is fine, but it would firmly put a natural language conversation in uncanny valley territory.

Regular chat already supports voice input, so might as well use that.

I've been using tools in the OpenAI SDK with voice for well over a year now.

Just super difficult.

See more here:

https://github.com/sibblegp/ODAI/blob/main/routers/app_voice...

I'm pretty sure that's a major part of this announcement? It delegates to GPT 5.5 which then uses tools.

What don't you like about the voice? Geniune question, I'm not using it in English but I think it sounds fine in my language, and it's an improvement over the previous one.

Hey! Bit of an unusual question maybe: if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think? If you hear about teenagers only spending time with your chatbot in 5 years, will you feel some amount of personal responsibility or not? Always curious to hear you guys' perspective on that kind of stuff!

Can I connect it to my skills/tools? Example case, I have a knowledge base and event log in my company. I need a brainstorm companion, which will have full access to this knowledge, can converse about it and can invoke skills/tools available in the repo.

Can it sing? Is it an end to end multimodal model?

Can it delegate to just one agent at a time or can it spawn multiple subagents for different tasks?

What made you to try again?

How does it compare to the realtime-2 model?

Does video/image input still work with these duplex models?

When is it rolling out? Currently on ChatGPT Pro but not seeing it yet?

Are you still using LiveKit for the back-and-forth architecture

> Would love to hear your feedback!

I'm currently on the 20 $/mo subscription and using codex meaningfully, and i'm loving this.

I am considering bumping my subscription to the 100 $/month and this might be the reason i switch, BUT: i really envision me using this also through other means as well (eg: agents like openclaw/hermes) in agentic ways.

Will this be supported?

I can make OpenAI stuff the center of my agentic AI life, but I need it to be interoperable.

Can we have less terrible voices please? Nothing that sounds like a bubbly millennial. Literally anything that has gravitas.

> GPT-Live-1 is the first version of a new generation of models, and we believe the full-duplex architecture + delegation enables entirely new ways of human-AI interaction.

Awesome. Are you guys able to share anything about the model architecture? I've been interested lately in split-transformer RVQ-based conversational agents, e.g. via stuff like https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10208 (ResGen) and https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18090 (MOSS-ITT) and of course Moshi (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00037).

Intuitively, decoupling semantic and audio-timeslice-space generations with coupled but distinct histories is right model architecture, not just for these sorts of assistants, but for domains like robotics too.

- As models get better, have you considered some kind of filter or particular cadence to serve as a reminder that the user is not talking to a human?

- The videos felt scripted and dishonest

Standard Intelligence released one two years ago:

https://si.inc/posts/hertz-dev/

It's only 8.5B and doesn't sound like it's quite conversational.

I want to know this too, as I’m hoping to fabricobble up a “smart speaker” that communicates with my local AI assistant. Right now we do everything via iMessage but it would be nice to be able to tell it to add things to my grocery list by voice while my hands are busy in the kitchen. Also would love if anyone has any advice on what microphone & speaker to pick out, was planning on just reusing a raspberry pi I’ve got around for the brain part.

Working on this at https://duplexio.ai which will be open weights and free for non-commercial use. If you want to work on this send an email to anders@duplexio.ai

Same. I might switch back to ChatGPT from Gemini because I use the voice feature all the time.

One of my favorite use cases is talking with it while driving on random topics and learning about them.

(Atty from OpenAI here)

Yes! GPT-Live is much better at ignoring background noise, including other people speaking. Not perfect, but you should feel a big difference.

yes, it now has much better ability to understand the conversation and decide whether it should respond (and you can also tell it when it should respond)

It changed because she came home to find her son treating his body like it was an amusement park

people have been mistaking AI conversations with reality since the very first text-based models came into the public view with ChatGPT. i'm sure with each incremental improvement to outputs like this, though, more people will get convinced of its "humanity"

(see https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

ChatGPT has had this for over a year too. This is a better model.

Gemini live is also pretty decent at computer vision stuff too. I've used it while working on my bike & car a few times, with my phone camera and it'll circle/highlight specific screws and parts. You can set your phone up on a tripod and it'll walk you through complete repairs for things.

One thing Simon pointed out: Usually live voice models are not as capable as the frontier ones. What makes this one special is that it can delegate the task to a frontier model while talking to you.

Is gemini live the same app I have on my oneplus 15? I don't think that's full duplex?

What do you mean? OpenAI has had a real-time voice model since August of last year. This is a new model with better performance.

Well Google has been working on voice assistants for years now on android. It makes sense that they had a head start

(Atty from OpenAI here)

We're beginning the rollout now, and will roll out in the next few days to ChatGPT users globally. Make sure to update to the latest version of the app!

GPT‑Live is rolling out now to ChatGPT users globally across iOS, Android, and ChatGPT.com. GPT‑Live‑1 will become the default model powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT‑Live‑1 mini will become the default for Free users.

Read the post

Now it consistently interrupts you

I've had some funny interactions with this issue. I sometimes use the voice mode when walking my dogs. I can confirm that ChatGPT responds positively to being told it's a "Good girl!"

I was going to post a comment on a related topic (I couldn't find in the announcement if this is English only or not), but would you mind expanding? I was thinking about doing something very similar, and yeah, if the model isn't hearing the mistakes I'm making, that would dramatically decrease it's usefulness.

You're right, and to me it's refreshing to see a promo video that shows how the real product works, rather than a sanitized over-produced edit that takes out all the flaws.

You have always been able to pick between voices of many kinds though? Do you find them all sultry? From the British woman to the 17th century pirate soundalike?

"I was hopeful that they avoided the well known sultry voice this go around, but alas"

Why do you care? You can select other voices. Why do you need to control others?

What is at the root of your need for domination?

(Atty from OpenAI here)

Yes, GPT-Live is much better at ignoring background noise! I use it every day in the car via our CarPlay integration.

Every second of the interaction is uncomfortable to me, but I also have extreme difficulty with video calls with humans. The latency completely breaks my mind.

I agree. Many times those little interjections don't feel natural. It's impressive, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

(Atty from OpenAI here)

GPT-Live does not support video at this point, but we're working hard to introduce it soon. In the meantime, our previous Advanced Voice Mode will continue to be available and supports video.

A cool test, until it hit's the my family's grandmas test :)

(Atty from OpenAI here)

You can choose among 9 voices in the app, all newly refreshed for GPT-Live. If you meant whether it can detect multiple people, it can (like in the livestream), but not always perfect. Would love to hear your feedback once you try it.

It was probably the original intent of OpenAI working with Apple ... but clearly there was a reason why Apple ditched OpenAI for Google/Gemini models instead.

If this is my idea of hell, I can't imagine what it'd be like for a 90 year old

One piece of feedback on that to anyone from their team, could not get audio sync in Firefox. Chrome worked fine.

I am wondering for whom this new device even would be. Because phones work quite well for this use case and much more and everyone already has a phone.

I was surprised all that made it into the demo video. Did not seem cool. Is that "active listening" or something?

(Atty from OpenAI here)

Coming soon! Sign up to be notified here: https://openai.com/form/gpt-live-1-in-the-api/

GPT-Live... buy me that thing I saw on tv

to show that anybody could use it - even older people who are less tech experts.

they are trying to expand beyond their tech audience.

“I don’t translate, I interpret” - Ahmed the best interpreter there ever was

They most definitely did not solve real time translation yet. The French in the video is barely understandable, both the translation and the pronunciation are the quality of an American who hasn't used French since high-school.

Why aren't you feeling the operating loss? :(