Yelp announced on September 10 that Yelp Host and Hatch have swapped in OpenAI’s new GPT-Live-1 as their underlying voice layer, and the numbers underneath that plumbing decision matter more than the announcement itself.

Yelp Host, launched in October 2025, has already fielded more than 1 million restaurant calls, growing at 38 percent month over month on average. By July it was running at a 2.4 million-call annual pace, roughly 200,000 calls a month, more than triple the January level. Hatch, which Yelp bought in January 2026 for roughly $270 million in cash plus $30 million in retention, was doing about $25 million ARR at 70 percent year-over-year growth as of November 2025. This isn’t a demo. It’s phone infrastructure for the long tail of American service businesses.

The upgrade is technical, but the implication is operational. GPT-Live-1 replies in 0.798 seconds on OpenAI’s Full Duplex Bench v1 turn-taking test, against 1.41 seconds for its predecessor GPT-Realtime-2.1. On the v1.5 interactivity test, which scores reactions to background speech, backchannels, and interruptions, it hits 80.1 percent versus 45.4 percent. Paired with the GPT-6 Astra backend on the Tau3 voice-agent benchmark covering airline, retail, and telecom customer service, it scores 86.2 percent to the older model’s 45.7 percent.

Translated: the bot no longer chokes when a customer talks over it, changes their mind mid-sentence, or switches language to yell at a kid in the background. Those are the calls that used to break turn-based voice agents and dump the caller to voicemail. In a restaurant or an HVAC shop, voicemail is a lost booking.

Pricing tells the same story. GPT-Live-1 runs $0.05 per minute at the API, billed per second, with backend model and tool usage charged separately. Yelp Host starts at $249 per month after a free trial. For a founder answering their own phone between services, that’s the going rate for a receptionist who doesn’t miss the call.

The composure of legacy phone answering was always institutional. It’s now becoming a line item.

Sources