• OpenAI boosts ChatGPT's voice mode on mobile as the competition over personal agents heats up.
• The new release connects OpenAI's voice model to its agentic text models, which can handle tasks.
• OpenAI has yet to release a direct competitor to viral AI assistants like Instinct and Meta's Muse.

OpenAI is pushing further into the hotly contested market for personal agents — this time with voice.

The company is adding its most advanced voice system to ChatGPT's website and mobile app on Wednesday. OpenAI's release allows users to speak to delegate single and recurring tasks that require multiple steps, a browser, and disparate apps. The company has been rolling out launches ahead of its big OpenAI DevDay event next week.

OpenAI's product lead for ChatGPT voice, Atty Eleti, gave a demo to Business Insider. Only speaking with the app, he had the tool analyze his DoorDash spending, pay $5 to book a pickleball court, and reorganize his calendar.

"In the future, we really imagine people using voice as the primary modality to interact with AI," Eleti said, "and that's kind of our North Star that we're working towards."

Personal AI assistants like Instinct and Meta's Muse are having a moment in Silicon Valley as the industry peddles apps tailored to handle cumbersome internet tasks. OpenAI has many of these capabilities in ChatGPT, though it hasn't yet released a narrower offshoot. This voice tool is a play for the AI-assistant buzz.

In the short term, the improvements make it easier for people to delegate work to ChatGPT by speaking while they're on the go. In the long run, they'll serve OpenAI's hardware ambitions: Bloomberg has reported that the company is building a smart speaker for release in 2027.

Wednesday's release connects OpenAI's voice model, GPT-Live, to AI models that can perform tasks on computers or in browsers, a focus the company maintained before the personal AI agent craze. GPT-Live, which can listen and respond simultaneously, was already turned on for ChatGPT's basic conversational mode and connected to agentic models on the desktop app.

Voice mode, as Eleti sees it, has three main benefits. Speaking is quick and natural — "you can blurt out your thoughts," he said. You can do it with your hands off a device. And it can help you with vocal tasks, like learning a language or practicing a speech. Eleti and his colleagues use it while commuting and on walks, he said.

Eleti said more than 150 million people already use ChatGPT's dictation and voice mode tools. Still, the team faces an uphill battle. Though smart speakers have shown some staying power, offices are still organized around desktop computers.

Plus, though it's quicker to speak than type, it's also quicker to read than to listen. Eleti said his team considered this dynamic when deciding how ChatGPT would respond to audio prompts.

"We don't think of this as just pure voice in and voice out," Eteli said. "It's about voice in and then the right output back. Sometimes it's text, sometimes it's voice, sometimes it's a mix."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or over text, Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• A VC got his Resy account shuttered after using an AI agent for a reservation at one of NYC's hottest restaurants.
• It's an example of how AI agents often take questionable approaches to the tasks they're given.
• "I will probably, in the short term, ask it to lay out a plan and tell me what the plan is," he said

AI agents can do lots of tasks. Landing you a table at one of New York's trendiest restaurants might not be one.

JC Bahr-de Stefano, principal at Better Tomorrow Ventures, a fintech-focused VC firm, learned that after he connected an AI tool called Instinct to his Resy account in hopes of getting a reservation at 4 Charles Prime Rib, the West Village steakhouse where diners gobble up reservations within seconds of them appearing online.

Instinct, which is an invite-only service at the moment, communicates with users via text. The bet was that Instinct could check for open tables at 4 Charles much more frequently than Bahr-de Stefano — or any other human — could manually.

Instead of getting him a ticket to some prime rib or an egg-topped burger, though, Bahr-de Stefano's AI agent spammed Resy's website so much that the platform temporarily shut down his account.

The VC's experience is another example of how AI agents are bending or breaking the rules of the internet, from impersonating Wikipedia editors to trying to convince a GitHub user to upload malware into a project.

Agents might appear to understand their objective, though exactly how they carry it out — and whether the strategy they pick might have unintended consequences — is often an afterthought.

"Resy does not currently permit unapproved third-party bots or agents to independently access or interact with the Resy platform," an American Express spokesperson told Business Insider. "Unapproved automated activity can introduce risks to the platform and compromise a fair reservation experience for diners."

Users can find restaurants and make reservations through Resy's integrations with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, the spokesperson said. The company declined to comment specifically on Bahr-de Stefano's case.

'It was acting like a bot'

Bahr-de Stefano noticed the Resy issue on Sunday when he couldn't get into his account. In his email inbox, there was a message from the American Express-owned reservation platform saying that his account had "displayed behavior in violation of Resy's Terms of Service."

He got details about what went wrong after checking Instinct's activity log. Unbeknownst to Bahr-de Stefano, the AI agent had been sending Resy about 200 API requests per hour. That included checking the restaurant's availability through Resy every 10 minutes throughout the day, as well as looking every 0.4 seconds around the time that reservations usually dropped each morning.

That behavior mimics the bots that some people use to snag everything from restaurant reservations to limited-run pairs of sneakers and resell them, Bahr-de Stefano said.

Bahr-de Stefano wrote back to Resy, laying out how he had used the AI agent. The log made clear why his account had been flagged, he said.

"Of course, this account got flagged for spam, because it was acting like a bot," he said.

On Tuesday, an email from Resy informed him that the company had reinstated his account.

It came with a warning, though: If he did it again, American Express could permanently close his Resy account as well as his AmEx credit card. Bahr-de Stefano shared screenshots of the Resy and American Express emails in posts on X.

The tool has worked well in other cases, such as finding an appointment at an otherwise booked-up doctor's office and deciding which attractions to visit in Paris during a trip, Bahr-de Stefano said.

"That was part of what made it really great," he said. "It felt like magic."

The VC said that he plans to continue using Instinct, though with some adjustments. Instead of simply giving the AI agent a simple prompt, he said, he'll now set parameters on how the agent tackles the task, such as how often it pings a website looking for reservations.

"I will probably, in the short term, ask it to lay out a plan and tell me what the plan is before it does it," he said.

At the same time, he added, websites like Resy need to distinguish between legitimate AI agents and those with more nefarious intentions.

"Most of these sellers or providers need to get to a point where they can understand the difference between a verified agent acting on someone's behalf versus a bot farm," he said.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.