Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today we're talking about the fact that OpenAI is betting the farm on audio AI.

This is way beyond chat. GPTs, just getting a nicer voice. There's a bunch of, there's a new report from the information that says that the company has spent the last two months consolidating engineering product research teams to rebuild its AI audio models. And they're doing this from the ground up. This is all ahead of an audio first personal device, which we're expecting to come out in roughly a year from now. There is a lot going on in the story. And a lot is at stake. So we're going to be covering all of that on the podcast today. If you want to try the latest AI audio models from Open AI or from 11 labs, which in my opinion is the best at the moment, I would recommend going and checking out AIbox.com. A.I. Have a playground that lets you access over 40 of the top models, everything from OpenAI, meta, Google, Deepseek, tons more. All these audio models, they're on there and you can try them out for $20 a month on my own startup, AIbox. I'll leave a link in the description if you want to go try that out. This big focus that we're seeing from OpenAI right now to push audio AI. I think shifts or essentially is kind of showing what's happening in the broader tech world. Right now, screens are starting to fade into the background. They're not, you know, the trendiest thing.

Most of these, a lot of these Silicon Valley startups and venture capitalists, a lot of people are

talking about how screen time or screen addiction is bad. And so it feels like people are kind of

pushing away from screens. And with that, audio is kind of taking the forefront. It feels like

this is the, you know, the response. There's, of course,

smart speakers that have already normalized voice assistants. And those are in over a third of U.S.

households. Meta recently added, of course, a feature to their reband smart glasses. They use a five

microphone array that essentially isolates a voice in a noisy environment. So if you're talking to

someone in a bar or at, you know, in some sort of noisy store or

market and you look at them, it has these five microphones, it isolates their voice and in

your ear will amplify just their voice.

So effectively, it is, you know, turning your head into a directional microphone.

Google also started testing audio overviews in June, which is, you know, covering the search

results into conversational summaries. And Tesla, of course, is weaving X-AI's grok into its

vehicles to create a voice-driven assistant that can help you when you're doing navigation or even

like climate control, that kind of stuff. You could just talk to it and say, hey, like, you know,

turn the heat up, et cetera. So big tech, I think right now is not the only one that is betting really big on audio. There is a collection of startups that are chasing the same idea. There's, you know, some of them that have, you know, been successful and others that have, it feels like, failed extraordinarily, including Humane's AI pin, which burned through hundreds of millions of

dollars before essentially becoming a bit of a cautionary tale for screenless wearables.

There's, of course, the friend AI pendant.

This is a necklace that you wear around your neck.

It got famous because the CEO bought friend.com for like $6 million and basically blew

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