I had preview access to this one for a few weeks. It's very good. I had one conversation that lasted a full hour while I was walking the dog, got some good brainstorming done against one of my projects.
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.
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.
> 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
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 have my Chat personality settings stripped right down to no-fluff. I'd want voice to be more akin to the Star Trek computer, and less akin to as you said an AI friend, but previously it was tuned too personable/friend-like.
Star Trek computer voice model is something I have yet to encounter, and I've looked repeatedly :) It's not about a specific voice, it's the fact they managed to capture "I am a utility" perfectly in the voice. Our modern friends do not want to be thought of as a utility, but to engender trust and agency all of their own and that's a huge problem for me.
Seems a bit knee jerk. I go on walks and bike rides all the time. A couple of times I’ve used voice mode and it’s been interesting. I could have listened to music or a podcast, listen to YouTube or just unplug. But every walk is different.
If you’re uncomfortable with this new world, and I’m sure I am even as I participate, you could tell us more about that?
> "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.
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.
> the answer is no it uses the latest gpt models now.
Actually it says it _can_ delegate to the latest models. Seems reasonable to ask how the voice model does when it doesn't delegate (or while waiting for the delegated answer).
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.
That is a nice idea and all, but perhaps there are things our friends aren't good at talking about. Perhaps something that is very related to a work project? Or like when I go down the rabbit hole discussing quantum mechanics and astro physics with ChatGPT because none of my friends understand that at even my level, and I'm looking to learn more about it from someone/something that does know more than me.
I'm looking forward to trying this out because I find that doing discovery on certain things feels more natural with voice. The previous voice chat was such a dumb GPT-4 era model that I resorted to using the dictate feature with GPT-5.5 and had it read the text response back to me.
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.
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.
I don't understand this line of reasoning. How are you hindered from doing any of those things? What part of "AI can now do X" makes it so you can't also do X?
We're yet to see how this plays out, but a competing business model for creative work is emerging, where it's delegated to chatbots. Naturally, this would result in less creative work for humans.
I'm no longer writing code from scratch, as I used to do before. So, very soon, it will be "AI can now do X" makes it so I can't also do X? Same with many creative works. Radio music already sounds so plastic. I lost interest in crafting my text drafts because I can just dump some ugly text and get it refined by AI.
Hasnt this already been thoroughly discussed? Your ability to do X degrades as you offload it more frequently, eventually to the point that you can no longer even vet the quality of the output.
I think the parent is saying now that that is attempting to be applied to "creativity" directly, as opposed to something like a shift of medium, that it threatens many peoples' ability to maintain creative capabilities.
Anecdotally I've already experienced this at work where post-AI we had a junior completely stagnate and a senior with over a decade of experience in the bay atrophy to the point that he had to be let go.
Playing the devil's advocate a little, you say "can't also do", but that implies prohibition, not hindering. Hindering is not total like that.
It's like trying to have meaningful conversations on Twitter. You don't go to Twitter to do things like that. Can you? Sure. It's just not what the format and the conventions lend themselves to.
I don't think there's much merit in pretending that human activities are only shaped by hard limits.
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.
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.
Let's not overdramatize, though. I'm not in need, or even in mood to talk to fellow humans every minute, so time spent with a clanker is not necessary taken from my human relations budget
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.
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!
Right, I think the challenge is that LLMs are essentially language-based, which is itself a very convenient interface. Covering the maximally humanistic default interface with something more mechanical is like tying your own shoelaces together, but it would protect us from the psychological hijacking we're so prone to when interacting with these machines.
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.
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?
I don't know the answer. But a robotic voice is probably not a bad idea — just having a reminder that the thing you're talking to is not actually anything like you. If you want to go full send, you could have the LLM generate a clickable interface on demand so you could interact with it as a machine. Voice/computer interfaces are obviously useful, especially for disabled folks. But the ones that existed in the past didn't pretend to laugh at your non jokes or imitate vocal fry.
> 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?
Market conditions are not a moral standard either, nor do they represent any cohesive one in particular. Not sure why you're contrasting their opinion with this, it's literally no better.
What I’m missing from this announcement is the capability to use connectors and tools. I don’t really get it - NONE of the frontier assistants can use tools / connectors while in voice mode - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. It seems so obvious: I want to be able to research stuff, pull up documents, jot down notes and do productive work while I’m talking to it, and not end voice mode whenever I need to connect to an app or service.
It’s weird. The old Claude voice mode WAS able to use tools but when they revamped it, it lost that capability and is now pinned to Haiku :(
So, yay for finally a voice mode that’s powered by a frontier model and hopefully as good as Grok voice, but sad to still not see tool use while in voice mode.
(I haven’t tried it yet, only read the announcement)
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.
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.
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.
Looking forward to a list of support languages. This would be amazing for language listening/speaking practice.
Yes I know it doesn't replace the talking to real people and "immersion". But cheaper than a flight
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Are there any open source full duplex models that are out besides PersonaPlex? There was a chinese open one, maybe Fun Audio chat or something, that said it was going to release a full duplex version but I am not sure if it did.
My dream would be open source full duplex with function calling or some kind of rudimentary text output. PersonaPlex is still interesting although it was looking like we would need to fine tune it to handle outgoing or avoid going off the rails easily.
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
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.
if you don't find that then you could fake it with personaplex possibly but making another ASR/STT model just listen continuously and transcribe then send to an LLM with function calling. at least that would allow one direction easily.
Does this model do better ignoring side conversations? That's the biggest hindrance to using ChatGPT's carplay feature is someone will say something, stopping ChatGPT from speaking or taking it in a different direction.
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)
I'm so mad that this might make me re-subscribe to ChatGPT. I wouldn't have believed how much I use the voice feature before LLMs and ChatGPT currently has the best voice interface. I think Grok's interface is the next best, then Claude.
Absolutely the same. Now that Fable is back, the Claude voice interface is... worth dealing with. The app mostly seems to have trouble recovering from networking issues which is jarring in a deep conversation.
But I don't think Fable or even Opus are ever used as the backend in voice mode. It has to respond in real time so I think in voice mode it's always using Sonnet.
Gemini live has been able to do this for over a year now. I can just activate it on my phone and it really works surprisingly well, especially the interruption. I've tested it with my 95 year old Dutch grandmother and it switched seamlessly between English and Dutch with her and handled her poor hearing very well, including her asking for repetition.
I'm a little surprised by how much OAI is playing catch up here.
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.
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.
I used it for double checking some stuff while helping my friend build his PC! I had it in tight spaces and it helped me verify some details around which nvme slot to use first.
This looks very cool. An AI that can listen and speak and handle tasks without breaking the flow of conversation would solve some big annoyances with current tools.
The concern is though as these get better will people struggle to distinguish these with real human connections?
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"
Every time things like this come up, I can't help but think of the ending of Inception.
It's less that you're convinced it's real and more that you no longer care if it is. "Feels real enough" is good enough.
I'm a technical user first, so I'm not sure if models have improved for RP the way they improved for applied STEM tasks and technical brainstorming. But if there is an improvement curve there, I wouldn't be surprised if this only grows in popularity.
I was missing the part where the grandmas are saying "I have absolutely no idea what I just said" :D
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Besides that really nice demo I will give this a try, I tried some voice models before and the issue is I will ask a question, get a answer withing the next ~1 sentence and then the usual LLM bs follows which I just wanted to skip at that point
This solves my biggest annoyance with the current advanced voice: its speech getting interrupted by me setting yup or even background noise if loud enough
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!"
For the first actor - why does her accent change the longer she talks. It's like they had an "Estelle Costanza" dial that they started at zero and slowly rolled up to 8 or 9.
The demo video shows quite how rough around the edges this is....
Doesn't quite stop fast enough when you interrupt it. Can't find info quick enough so you have to change topic and then have it give you results later, etc.
This is a move in the right direction, but there is lots of engineering still to be done!
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.
I'm currently watching Better Call Saul for the first time with my wife. The fact that they used old ladies for the Ad, and that it is evident they are reading from a prompt (fake-ish feeling) gives me strong James McGill vibes haha. Hopefully the actresses were paid handsomely.
Hoping to use this for natural conversation language learning. Previous iterations of the app kept correcting my words/grammar before it got to the model, causing issues with identifying mistakes in speech
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.
Didn't Standard Intelligence release a duplex model two years ago? Sounds disingenuous to market this as a new generation of voice models, when it is really OpenAI finally catching up to the current generation after two years.
Hopefully this also means it does better with "interruptions". I have used ChatGPT Voice in the car before and sometimes car/road noises will cause it to stop responding in the middle.
I used it to help me figure out how to turn off a feature in the rental car I was in (adaptive cruise control, I love it but snow blocked the sensor and I wanted just normal cruise control but couldn't figure it out while driving).
This kind of voice chat is awesome and I'll be even more excited when open models have this functionality. I'd love something like this paired with Home Assistant (assuming we ever get decent hardware).
this is excellent, I've been meaning to update my phone-dialer.apk "fake phone conversation" for when I'm trying to get out of a social sitation (not joking)
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?
If there was a voice that stripped away all the affectation I would be more likely to use it. It pretending to be human is extremely off-putting for me.
The new architecture makes sense, it seems many of the remaining problems like noise and interruptions are at the sound processing and integration level rather than at an architectural or model level now which makes for an exciting new era.
There doesn’t seem to be any indication whether this is available in the chat-got app nor is there any indication in the app that anything has changed. Anyone know how to actually try this?
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.
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!
I like this and felt like some of it was much more fluid; but was I alone in feeling like the interjected "uh-huh" or "yeah?" moments felt a little jarring?
Almost felt a bit *uncanny valley* for what "natural" conversation is supposed to be like. If the "uh huh" isn't timed correctly, it'll feel like a zoom call with lag.
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.
Oh wow, I'd like this. Our current voice interactions with ChatGPT are on a 4o era model; really terrible. oAI has always been pretty cagey on the architecture of their end to end multimodal models. And RL has basically made them worse since launch. (Check the launch videos where the model sings, is more realtime, has accents, etc). I'd love to try a next gen version.
The potential conversational dynamics of people telling each other "quiet!" after they pick up the habit from talking with AI will be interesting. It could lead to people being more assertive and thoughtful, or it could be contentious and rude.
Awesome that they've improved that aspect of voice chat, though.
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.
It would be great if we could have AI that wasn't trying to emulate a human. When it expresses emotion, we should see that as a bug that needs to be fixed.
I do not fully understand the complexity behind achieving full-duplex but I hope this sets the bar for Anthropic to follow. Turn-based simplex is yesterday.
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.
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.
Is it possible to create a "companion" of sorts with this model, using, say, an RPi and a speaker + microphone? Not for advanced scientific brainstorming, but for seniors who are often alone in their homes.
Try being a 90-year old with minimal social contact and nobody to talk to, wasting away in front of a TV blasting NewsMax or Fox News ... does that sound like Heaven or Hell?
This had to land before there new device could be launched, i.e. human to AI full duplex interaction, Apple should be worried. They fumbled so hard on AI.
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.
While this is likely very useful to an enormous number of people, I suspect it will be even more useful for the elderly (if somehow it can be made accessible to them).
IIUC the literature, there is serious loss of functionality associated with lack of verbal interaction. People can say "they should just talk to more people" or "more people should make time for them" but the fact of the matter is that it doesn't happen, and if this helps terrific.
Absolutely can't wait to try this for language practice. The advanced voice mode is great but ultimately just doesn't work that well and doesn't have the feel of a natural conversation.
Basically have an older lady (not their target audience) blatantly reading a teleprompter.
Why are they going after this audience? Retired people have no use for delegated tasks or information. They also are the least likely to use it and not get frustrated.
I for one am greatly looking forward to the day these kind of voice models can be run locally. It seems like the gap between open-weight and frontier is way larger for voice models than coding/language models.
watched the live translation video very impressive
Seems like a shift from previous voice models where it sequentially processes voice to text then feeds it to LLM and then back which cant escape the clunky lag
not sure how pipecat stands now, gpt live seems like it takes audio tokens and does inference on it directly
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.