What exactly is involved in creating a voice-activated AI assistant ?

OpenAI must be doing something right when a guy like me, who teaches innovation, can’t be bothered anymore to attend Apple’s latest product launches, previously red-letter days, while instead I was glued to yesterday’s live-stream OpenAI demo.

There had certainly been plenty of speculation in the run up to the event: prompting Sam Altman to try to clear up any doubts on X: this wasn’t the launch of ChatGPT 5 or a search engine, as some had speculated, even posting a concept video; instead, OpenAI has been “working on some new things that we think people are going to love” which he thinks are “magical”.

Joining up the dots by tying those comments with a recent live interview, like this one with MIT Tech Review, in which he said that personal assistants were going to be “the real killer function of AI”, that we don’t need “a lot more data or additional hardware”, and that ChatGPT was “incredibly dumb compared to what’s coming,” It seems that the new product could be some kind of real-time personal voice assistant, along the lines of the movie “her”, capable of taking on the role of a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.”