OpenAI announced on Thursday that its API will now include a suite of new voice intelligence features, designed to help developers build apps that can talk, transcribe, and translate conversations with users. Because apparently, typing is so last decade.

The company's new GPT-Realtime-2 is another voice model, built to create a realistic vocal simulation that can converse with users. Unlike its predecessor (GPT-Realtime-1.5), this one comes with GPT-5-class reasoning, which OpenAI says was created to deal with more complicated requests from users. So yes, it's smarter, but it still can't order a pizza without asking for a tip.

Also launching is GPT-Realtime-Translate, which, as the name suggests, provides real-time translation services that "keep pace" with the user, conversationally. The feature supports more than 70 input languages (the languages it can comprehend) and 13 output languages (the languages it relays to the speaker). That's a lot of languages, but we're still waiting for it to translate sarcasm.

Finally, there's GPT-Realtime-Whisper, a new transcription capability that gives users live speech-to-text as interactions occur. Because taking notes manually is so 2019.

"Together, the models we are launching move real-time audio from simple call-and-response toward voice interfaces that can actually do work: listen, reason, translate, transcribe, and take action as a conversation unfolds," the company said. In other words, your phone might finally understand you when you say "I'm on my way" while you're still in bed.

Who will these updates benefit? Companies wanting to expand customer service capabilities are an obvious target. But OpenAI also notes the features will assist with education, media, events, and creator platforms. Because nothing says 'education' like a robot that can talk over you.

As useful as these tools seem from an enterprise perspective, they could also be misused. The company says it has built guardrails to prevent abuse like spam, fraud, or other online misdeeds. Certain triggers are embedded in the system so that "conversations can be halted if they are detected as violating our harmful content guidelines." So, if you try to use it to scam old ladies, it'll just hang up. How polite.

All the new voice models are included in OpenAI's Realtime API. Translate and Whisper are billed by the minute, while GPT-Realtime-2 is billed by token consumption. Because in the future, you'll pay for every syllable.