OpenAI Lets Anyone Use Its New Voice Assistant in Third-Party Apps

OpenAI is letting businesses and developers include its real-time voice assistant in their own applications, paving the way for more users to have realistic-sounding spoken conversations with an artificial intelligence system for a wide range of tasks.

The feature, which is similar to the newest voice assistant available to paying users of its ChatGPT chatbot, is set to be made available on Tuesday to those building apps and services with OpenAI’s application programming interface, or API. Businesses will be able to develop software such as a voice-based customer service bot or a travel app that places phone calls on a user’s behalf, OpenAI said. Some companies have already been testing out the new voice capability, including health coaching app Healthify and language learning app Speak.

The third-party voice integration is one of a number of updates OpenAI is announcing at a developer event in San Francisco on Tuesday. The conference offers OpenAI a chance to show how it plans to stay ahead of an increasingly crowded market for AI software at a time when it’s looking to close a large funding round. It also comes days after several leaders, including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, said they planned to depart the startup — the latest in a series of high-ranking employees to leave in recent months.

While OpenAI unveiled a new AI model at its first-ever developer conference last November, the company said it won’t be doing so this year. Instead, OpenAI is focusing on showing off new API capabilities and meeting with some of the 3 million developers working with its software in different parts of the world. Tuesday’s event is intended to be the first of three, with others to be held in London and Singapore.

At a press briefing ahead of the event, OpenAI employees demonstrated the new voice feature with a fictional travel app. Romain Huet, OpenAI’s head of developer experience, asked the fake app to call a made-up business, Ilan’s Strawberries, and order 400 chocolate-covered berries while keeping the budget under $1,500. Immediately, the app placed a call — a feature made possible, it was explained, by the app’s use of an API from cloud communications company Twilio Inc. — and a phone next to Huet rang. Huet picked up and, acting as if he was a worker at the strawberry business, took an order from the voice assistant. He said it would cost about $1,200 for the strawberries.