A phone agent you can interrupt mid-sentence, that keeps its place and keeps talking, is now something a developer can rent by the minute. OpenAI put GPT-Live-1 into its API on September 10 at $0.05 a minute for the voice layer. What’s different is that one model listens and talks at the same time. OpenAI’s own description of the usual voice bot: it transcribes you, ships the text to a reasoning model, reads the answer back, and every handoff adds a pause. This one skips the handoffs.
Where the thinking happens is up to whoever builds it. The voice model passes hard questions to a backend model, and OpenAI’s example pairs it with a cheap model for scheduling and order updates and a strong one for the complicated calls. Tone, pace and personality come from the system prompt. It sits through background noise and silence without narrating, keeps its place across a long call, and takes phone calls. Yelp says Yelp Host is already answering restaurant calls with it, reservations and food orders.
The $0.05 buys the voice only. The model doing the thinking is billed separately, so the cost of a full call isn’t on the page. New voices across accents, dialects and languages ship with it; a custom voice goes through sales.