OpenAI releases GPT-Realtime-2, GPT-Realtime-Translate and GPT-Realtime-Whisper
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra7 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen37 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It is after the cutoff of GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 4 Hydrogen, and can be in the training data of Claude Opus 5.5 and Grok 4.7.
Key facts
- gpt-realtime-2: text $4 / $24, audio $32 / $64 per 1M tokens; 128K context (up from 32K), 32K max output
- gpt-realtime-translate: v1/realtime/translations endpoint, 70+ input and 13 output languages (press), $0.034 per minute
- gpt-realtime-whisper: streaming speech-to-text, tunable latency, $0.017 per minute
- Benchmarks (OpenAI launch post, quoted by secondary sources; post itself 403 to our tools): gpt-realtime-2 (high) +15.2% on Big Bench Audio vs gpt-realtime-1.5; (xhigh) +13.8% on Audio MultiChallenge instruction following. One blog gives 96.6% absolute on Big Bench Audio at xhigh (unconfirmed)
- Superseded by gpt-realtime-2.1 on 2026-07-06 and, for transcription, gpt-live-transcribe on 2026-07-28
What happened
OpenAI shipped three Realtime API models the same day. GPT-Realtime-2 brings adjustable reasoning to speech-to-speech voice agents (press described it as GPT-5-class reasoning) and quadruples the context to 128K tokens. GPT-Realtime-Translate is a dedicated simultaneous-interpretation model billed per minute. GPT-Realtime-Whisper streams transcripts from live audio.
Why it matters
Reasoning moved into the low-latency voice loop instead of being bolted on via a separate text model, and live translation became a standalone API product, a month before Google’s Gemini 3.5 Live Translate.
The official post (openai.com) could not be fetched by our tools; language counts come from press coverage.
Sources
7 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
7 sources: 5 primary, 2 press
Primary
- OpenAI - Advancing voice intelligence with new models in the APIopenai.com, official
- OpenAI API changelogdevelopers.openai.com, docs
- gpt-realtime-2 model pagedevelopers.openai.com, docs
- gpt-realtime-translate model pagedevelopers.openai.com, docs
- OpenAI Developer Community - New Realtime Voice Models in the APIcommunity.openai.com, official
Press
- Build Fast with AI - GPT-Realtime-2 benchmarks (secondary)blog.buildfastwithai.com, press
- gHacks - OpenAI releases three new realtime voice modelsghacks.net, press
Changes
- Added benchmark deltas (Big Bench Audio, Audio MultiChallenge) from secondary quotes of the 403-blocked launch post, plus OpenAI community announcement link
- Filed