• 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."

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• Disney is raising the prices for Disney+ and Hulu.
• The ad-free Hulu-Disney+ bundle now costs $21.99 a month.
• Media giants have been consistently hiking streaming prices.

Disney+ is getting more expensive for the sixth year in a row.

The cost of the ad-free Disney+ and Hulu plans will imminently increase to $21.49 a month, up from $18.99 a month, a company spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. Bloomberg first reported the pricing change.

Disney is hiking the ad-free bundle of Disney+ and Hulu to $21.99 a month, up from $19.99, the spokesperson said.

Disney is raising the cost of its stand-alone, ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu plans to $12.49 a month. The price of the ad-supported Hulu-Disney+ bundle is staying flat at $12.99.

Streaming services have consistently received price hikes as media giants strive to satisfy Wall Street. However, companies like Disney and Netflix have hiked prices for ad-supported plans more gradually, reasoning that they can generate more incremental revenue from those subscribers and give customers a lower-cost alternative.

Peacock hiked prices in August and now charges $19.99 a month for its ad-free plan, up from $16.99, while its ad-supported version costs $12.99 a month instead of $10.99.

Netflix raised prices in March, asking subscribers to pay $2 more a month for its standard ad-free plan ($19.99) and the premium 4K plan ($26.99). The cost of Netflix's ad-supported plan rose by $1 a month to $8.99. That plan is tied for the cheapest among major streamers with Paramount+ and the stand-alone ads version of Prime Video.

Apple TV increased its cost to $14.99 a month in August, up from $12.99. The tech giant doesn't offer an ad-supported tier.

Consumers have increasingly turned to free services like YouTube, Tubi, and The Roku Channel as streaming prices have risen in recent years.

Several Hollywood giants, including Disney and Paramount Skydance, are exploring adding free tiers to their streamers.

• Anthropic posted a sales job directly targeting one of its biggest customers, Meta.
• The AI lab took down the job posting after Business Insider asked about it.
• Meta and Anthropic have a complicated relationship, as both pushing to develop frontier AI.

Anthropic posted — and then deleted — a job listing for a salesperson tasked with selling to Meta, its AI rival and one of its largest customers.

The listing, titled "Mega Account Executive, Meta," appeared on Anthropic's job board at a delicate moment for the companies' relationship.

Meta still spends hundreds of millions of dollars a month as Anthropic's customer, according to a recent New York Times report. But it's also trying to reduce its reliance on Anthropic's AI tools as Anthropic is shoring up its finances ahead of a massive initial public offering.

The post suggests Anthropic is betting Meta will remain a major customer even as Meta builds more capable AI models of its own.

After Business Insider asked Anthropic about the listing on Wednesday, the company pulled it down. Anthropic and Meta declined to comment.

Anthropic's job posting offered an annual salary of $380,000 to $450,000, and didn't mention Meta outside the title. It said the salesperson would "win new business and drive revenue within a book of strategic digital native accounts."

The listing stands out for its specificity. Other Anthropic account executive openings target broad regions or sectors, including startups in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, or the public sector in Southeast Asia.

Anthropic's AI coding tool, Claude Code, became popular across Silicon Valley, including at Meta, this year. One internal projection said Meta could spend $10 billion annually on Anthropic, the Times reported. Meta's head of AI product, Nat Friedman, told employees that if Meta decreased its reliance on Anthropic's tools, it could hit Anthropic's revenue as it approaches its IPO, the report said.

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• Salesforce has been in talks to acquire AI startup Listen Labs for around $2 billion.
• Listen Labs, which was last valued at $500 million, sells an AI market analysis platform.
• Recent AI M&A deals include Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition of AI startup Hugging Face.

Salesforce could be on the hunt for acquisitions to beef up its AI capabilities.

The software giant has recently been in talks to buy Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research platform for around $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks have not been finalized and could ultimately be unsuccessful, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.

Salesforce and Listen Labs did not respond to requests for comment.

Listen Labs was founded in 2023 by Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann, who first met as undergraduates at Harvard University while building an AI avatar app that went viral, attracting 20,000 users on its first day, according to Sequoia Capital. Juengermann was previously a national champion in competitive programming in Germany.

They used an early version of what would become Listen Labs to interview users, which helped them realize that using AI for market research would be extremely valuable.

The company's software automates much of the qualitative research process, which has typically been expensive and time-consuming.

Customers include Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, Nestle, Sweetgreen, and Perplexity. At the beginning of the year, Listen Labs said it had grown its annualized revenue by 15x and interviewed more than one million people in nine months.

For Salesforce, the deal would strengthen its broader quest to make its agentic AI platform, Agentforce, more than just about automating repetitive work. Listen Labs could boost Agentforce by understanding what customers are thinking. It could recommend which products they might buy and craft the perfect pitch for salespeople to close a deal.

If the deal were finalized, it would be part of a wave of AI acquisitions in recent weeks, with Nvidia acquiring HuggingFace for around $12.9 billion and Stripe buying OpenRouter for around $8 billion.

Salesforce has been pushing to improve its AI efforts, with a particular focus on enterprise agents. The Information reported that they considered acquiring HuggingFace before it was sold to Nvidia.

Listen Labs was last valued at $500 million in a financing round earlier this year. Its backers include Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Conviction Partners, and Pear VC.