OpenAI just shipped GPT-Live-1 in the API, and I sat down with Peter Bakkum, Member of the Technical Staff working on the realtime APIs to hear his take on how this changes the game. I have been so excited for this launch - over the past few months we've been working with Open AI in alpha testing the latest speech to speech API and I'm really impressed. Instead of chaining together separate speech-to-text, language, and text-to-speech models, GPT-Live-1 reasons across incoming and outgoing audio as one continuous interaction. That matters because VAD and turn detection have wreaked havoc on voice agents. Awkward pauses, interruptions, dropped context, background noise, and accidental responses to silence can all make an agent feel painfully robotic. GPT-Live-1 is designed around a more fluid, turnless interaction model. The result is a conversation that feels much closer to how people actually speak. It also introduces a compelling architecture for balancing natural conversation with deep intelligence. The voice model can stay fast and context-aware while delegating complex reasoning and tool calls to a backend model—including third-party models. Developers can shape tone, pace, and conversational style directly through the system prompt. Longer sessions retain context and quality more reliably. And full-duplex telephony support opens the door to real phone-based agents for customer support, restaurant reservations, scheduling, and much more. In our conversation, Peter and I cover: - What made this API particularly difficult to build and deploy - How developers can prepare to migrate from cascaded architectures - Why voice evaluations are essential - How full-duplex models change the way we build voice agents - The entirely new categories of applications this technology could unlock Voice is becoming a the interface of AI and this release brings that future meaningfully closer. Listen to the full conversation at the link below.  🎙️ Youtube: Spotify: