OpenAI Introduces GPT-Live — Voice Model That Delegates Hard Tasks to a Frontier Model Mid-Conversation

Summary

OpenAI announced GPT-Live on July 8, 2026, an upgraded model powering ChatGPT's voice mode and replacing the previous GPT-4o-era voice system. The distinguishing behavior is task delegation: for questions that require web search, deeper reasoning, or more complex work, GPT-Live hands off to OpenAI's latest frontier model behind the scenes (currently GPT-5.5) while keeping the spoken conversation flowing. OpenAI says it plans to keep updating the delegation backend over time without changing the