OpenAI just dropped a new AI model that\u2019s designed to sound like an actual, human conversation partner\u2014and the company says it marks progress towards building AGI.<\/p>\n
For years, OpenAI has been investing in the development of AI tools that can speak in humanlike voices. That\u2019s sometimes led to controversy, as when the company debuted a voice assistant that sounded suspiciously similar<\/a> to Scarlett Johansson. The various shortcomings of AI assistants, meanwhile, such as their difficulty in understanding context, has become a fertile source of mockery on social media.<\/p>\n Now the company is hoping to turn the page on its AI voice assistant efforts\u2014and, it hopes, bring the technology to a more mainstream audience\u2014with the newly released GPT-Live-1, which it calls<\/a> its \u201csmartest voice model yet.\u201d<\/p>\n Unveiled on Wednesday, the model is able to communicate in lifelike voices, sprinkled with subtle intricacies that inflect actual human speech, like sudden bursts of laughter and short intakes of breath before a sentence. But more importantly for OpenAI\u2019s goal of boosting AI voice assistants\u2019 appeal, GPT-Live-1 also knows when to keep quiet: It can be a passive fly on the wall, attentively following a conversation without chiming in every ten seconds. During these quiet periods it will sprinkle in the occasional \u201cRight\u201d or \u201cMmhmm,\u201d to remind users that it\u2019s listening.<\/p>\n GPT-Live-1 defers to GPT-5.5 for more complex requests, theoretically making it useful not just for idle conversations but also for tasks that require a deeper level of reasoning. It also comes with upgraded real-time web search and translation capabilities, which OpenAI is likewise underscoring in the hopes of boosting its appeal as a general-purpose assistant.<\/p>\n In short, OpenAI is hoping all these new features\u00a0will add to users\u2019 feeling that they\u2019re interacting with something more than just a glorified search engine. \u201cYou can even forget you\u2019re talking to an AI,\u201d Yuchen Zhang, a research engineer at OpenAI, said in Chinese during a livestreamed demo on Wednesday, as GPT-Live-1 translated his words to English. \u201cHow should I put it? It\u2019s a really, really amazing feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n