Productivity

OpenAI opens GPT-Live-1 to developers at $0.05 a minute — and service businesses are first to answer

OpenAI released its full-duplex voice model in the API on September 10, and Yelp deployed it inside Yelp Host and Hatch the same day, putting always-on call handling within reach of small operators.

By Esi Boateng· Productivity tools·2026-09-12·3 min read

OpenAI released GPT-Live-1 in the API on September 10 at $0.05 a minute, billed per second, and Yelp switched it on inside Yelp Host and Hatch the same day. The gap between consumer debut and developer release was 64 days: the model became the default voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users inside ChatGPT on July 8, 2026 (with GPT-Live-1 mini serving Free users), and it’s now something any restaurant owner or plumbing dispatcher can wire into a phone line.

The pricing is the story before the benchmarks are. A contact center running 40,000 minutes a month pays roughly $2,000 for the voice layer alone, per Agile Brand Guide’s sizing, before reasoning, telephony, and integration costs. WebRTC sessions bill 15 seconds during initialisation, and active time counts whether the user is talking, the assistant is talking, or the backend is thinking.

The performance case is that turn-taking finally works. OpenAI reports GPT-Live-1 replies 0.798 seconds after a caller stops speaking, versus 1.41 seconds for GPT-Realtime-2.1, roughly 43% sooner. On Full Duplex Bench v1.5 it scores 80.1% against 45.4%. Paired with GPT-6 Astra at medium reasoning effort, it hits 86.2% Pass@1 on Tau3 (Voice) Intelligence, where GPT-Realtime-2.1 lands at 45.7%. On Tau Banking (Voice) Knowledge it passes 31 of 97 tasks (32.0%) with Astra, against 12 for GPT-Realtime-2.1 and 10 for GPT-Realtime-2. Speak, the language-tutoring platform, told OpenAI its early evaluation cut interruptions during learners’ thinking pauses by almost 80% versus previous turn-based systems.

Yelp’s numbers explain why service businesses were queued up for this. Yelp Host, the voice agent for restaurants, launched in October 2025 and has now handled more than 1 million calls, growing an average 38% month over month and hitting a 2.4 million annual run rate by July 2026, or roughly 200,000 calls a month. A July 28, 2026 update added OpenTable, pickup ordering, and 16 more languages. It starts at $249 a month after a free trial of up to 30 days, and pairs with Yelp Guest Manager.

Hatch, the communication platform for home service businesses that integrates with ServiceTitan and Jobber, arrived by acquisition. Yelp agreed in January 2026 to buy the 2018-founded company for approximately $270 million in cash plus $30 million in employee retention, when Hatch was doing roughly $25 million ARR at 70% year-over-year growth and managing tens of millions of leads a year across voice, text, email, and web, per the Business Wire release from San Francisco.

Every previous voice-AI cycle, from IVR to the Alexa-for-business era, promised to answer the phone and mostly didn’t. This one arrives priced like a metered utility.

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