OpenAI Blog

Introducing next-generation audio models in the API

For the first time, developers can also instruct the text-to-speech model to speak in a specific way—for example, “talk like a sympathetic customer service agent”—unlocking a new level of customization for voice agents.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Conversation Coach: A Voice-enabled AI System that Helps Practice Difficult Workplace Conversations

Conversation Coach is a voice‑first AI system that lets managers rehearse difficult workplace conversations in a realistic spoken format. It tackles low‑latency interaction, adaptive bot personalities that simulate various employee types, and personalized feedback on content and policy compliance. The authors compare an end‑to‑end speech‑to‑speech model with a cascaded approach, finding the former offers lower latency and cost, while the cascaded model provides better reasoning for coaching quality, and they deployed the cascaded architecture to 40,000+ managers over six months.

By Fanyou Wu, Suraj Maharjan, Ainur Yessenalina, Dennis Xu Chen, Rahul Srivastava, Srinivasan H. Sengamedu