ChatGPT is retiring Advanced and Standard Voice, a year after users forced a U-turn

OpenAI is removing two of ChatGPT’s three voice modes. Advanced Voice and Standard Voice will disappear from the app’s voice settings, and anyone still using them will be switched automatically to GPT-Live, the model that can listen and talk at the same time. For most people nothing changes, because OpenAI says almost everyone who uses voice in ChatGPT has already moved over. For the minority who picked an older mode on purpose, the choice itself is going away.

That minority has fought this fight before. The last time OpenAI announced a sunset for Standard Voice, users filled its developer forum and Reddit with complaints, and the company backed down within weeks. This time OpenAI has put a fixed cutoff in its release notes and attached a number to justify it: voice use in ChatGPT nearly doubled once GPT-Live arrived.

The three modes work in very different ways. GPT-Live keeps the microphone open while it speaks, so you can interrupt it mid-sentence, it can drop a quick acknowledgment while you are still talking, and it can stay silent while you think. When a request is too complex for the voice model, it passes the work to one of OpenAI’s text models in the background and keeps the conversation going. Advanced Voice also handled audio directly, but it waited for you to finish before it answered.

Standard Voice was the clunky one, and that is exactly why it has fans. It chained three models: one turned your speech into text, a regular ChatGPT text model wrote the reply, and a third read that reply aloud. The pauses were longer, but the answer was the same one you would have got by typing, at the same length and with the same context.

That gap is the core of the complaint. A ChatGPT user who lost Standard Voice early on the web and Mac apps in September wrote on OpenAI’s community forum that Live Voice answers are “dramatically shorter and much less substantive”, and that switching from text to voice halfway through a long project felt like handing it to a different assistant. In last year’s revolt the objections were also about personality. One Reddit user quoted by TechRadar described the Standard voice they had used for over a year as “one of the most comforting parts” of their ChatGPT experience.

The retirement is also less complete than the headline suggests. Live video and screen sharing, the features that let ChatGPT look through your camera or at your screen during a voice chat, will keep running on Advanced Voice because GPT-Live cannot do either yet, and OpenAI has given no timeline for adding them. Voice chats with custom GPTs stay on Advanced Voice until the cutoff, as part of a separate plan to move custom GPTs over to plugins, with a later date for FedRAMP and some Enterprise workspaces. OpenAI is removing a menu option here, while the older engine keeps running behind its visual features.

OpenAI says feedback from people who preferred the older modes will shape GPT-Live, and it names three areas: more detailed responses, better continuity across conversations and more personalization. That list reads like the complaints themselves. The company has not said when any of those improvements will ship.

Nothing you said to the old modes disappears. Conversations started in Advanced or Standard Voice stay in your ChatGPT history, and you can reopen them and continue by typing or speaking, with GPT-Live handling any new spoken replies. OpenAI’s notes mention no regional exceptions for the voice change itself, so it applies wherever ChatGPT offers voice.

OpenAI began notifying users on November 10. Advanced and Standard Voice remain available until December 11, 2026, when both leave the Settings and Voice menu and ChatGPT moves the remaining users to GPT-Live, the model it launched in July. The previous reversal came on September 9, 2025, when Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, posted on X that Standard Voice would stay after users pushed back.

This time the end date is already printed in OpenAI’s release notes.

Tags: OpenAI, chatgpt, AI assistants, GPT-Live, Advanced Voice, ChatGPT Voice