An AI phones you at 8 a.m. and asks about your day

You swipe away a reminder without looking. A phone call doesn't work like that: it rings until you deal with it.

On November 2, OpenAI opened outbound calling to all organizations. The GPT-Live voice model used to only answer. Now it can dial.

The idea in one line: every morning an AI calls you, spends three minutes asking what matters today, and sums up your plan in one sentence.

The surprising part

The whole app is one request. It holds a phone number and a description of how to behave. No mobile app, no speech recognition of your own. The model does the listening and the talking.

And it talks like a person on the line: it keeps listening while it speaks. Cut it off mid-word and it stops.

Now the money. GPT-Live costs $0.05 a minute, billed by the second. A three-minute call is 15 cents. A month of daily calls is about $4.50. The number and the carrier's minutes cost extra.

What you need

The internet and the phone network are two different worlds. A SIP provider sits between them. You buy a number from it, and it connects the call to the model. OpenAI's docs use Twilio as the example.

Make sure your provider supports secure connections: TLS and SRTP. Without them the call won't go through.

What you'll learn

• Writing for the voice. Instructions for a call aren't a chat: short phrases, one question at a time.
• Running things on a schedule. Cron is what starts your script at 8:00 by itself.
• Keeping secrets. Your API key and SIP password live in .env on the server.
• Reading statuses. A 200 means "session created", not "they picked up". That's a separate event.

Ready-to-use starter prompt

The weak prompt gets you a chatbot in a browser. The strong one gets you an actual call: who's calling, what it asks, when it ends.

What you end up with

8:00. Your phone rings. You pick up:

— Hi, this is your AI assistant. What matters most today?

— Getting the report in.

— What could get in the way?

— There's a lunch call, it always…

— Got it. Report before lunch, then. Have a good one!

Save the number as "Morning" and your alarm clock with questions is done.

Honest limits. Voices in OpenAI's list are labeled with only a handful of languages. The docs advise writing the instructions in the language you want and listening to the result, and we haven't tested how every language sounds. Check that your provider can call your country and what that costs. The script only runs while your computer is on, so a daily call needs a small server.

And the main rule. Only call yourself, or people who have clearly agreed. Automated calls come with laws and rules that differ by country. Have the AI say it's an AI right away, every time.

Voice AI used to wait for you to open an app. Now it can call you first. Start with yourself.

Source: Telephony and SIP — Place an outbound call (OpenAI)