OpenAI's forthcoming smart speaker will likely cost more than $300, with pricing discussions inside the company reaching as high as $400, according to a Bloomberg report by Mark Gurman citing people familiar with the matter. The battery-powered device is shaped like a doughnut roughly the size of a hockey puck, uses moving parts to appear responsive during conversations, and is being positioned by OpenAI as a smartphone replacement. A reveal is planned for this year, with a 2027 release.
The pricing puts the device well above the smart-speaker mainstream. Amazon's 15.6-inch Echo Show 15, which includes a display, retails at $300. The $220 Echo Studio adds virtual surround sound. OpenAI's puck-shaped speaker would carry no display and would rely almost entirely on ChatGPT voice interaction to justify a premium of at least $80 over Amazon's top audio speaker.
Bloomberg reports the speaker will behave like ChatGPT's mobile voice mode, but with more advanced models tuned for humanlike back-and-forth. It will also control smart-home devices. The moving parts and indicator lights are intended to make the hardware feel more alive than a stationary speaker — a design cue aimed at differentiating the product from Amazon's Alexa+ line and Google's Nest speakers, both of which sit dormant between prompts.
Key facts
- 01OpenAI's smart speaker will likely retail above $300, with internal discussions reaching $400.
- 02The device is shaped like a doughnut roughly the size of a hockey puck, with moving parts and indicator lights.
- 03OpenAI is targeting a reveal this year and a 2027 release, pending resolution of Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit.
- 04The speaker was designed with LoveFrom, the studio of former Apple designer Jony Ive.
- 05It would be OpenAI's second hardware product after the $230 Codex Micro mini keyboard.
The industrial design comes from LoveFrom, the studio founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive. Bloomberg's sources cite high-quality metal and other premium materials. That partnership sits at the center of ongoing litigation: Apple is suing OpenAI, alleging the AI company took trade secrets tied to hardware development. OpenAI ran an internal review after the suit was filed and concluded the speaker does not use Apple IP. Apple's complaint remains in progress, and Bloomberg noted the 2027 timeline assumes the lawsuit does not force delays.
The device would become OpenAI's second piece of consumer hardware, following the $230 Codex Micro mini keyboard. The company is reportedly evaluating additional AI-powered devices beyond the speaker. OpenAI has declined to comment on its product roadmap.
The commercial bet is unusual. ChatGPT already has a vastly larger user base than Amazon's Alexa+, but those users access the chatbot on phones and laptops they already own. Asking them to pay $300 to $400 for a dedicated speaker — on top of a subscription for the most capable models — is a steep incremental ask. Fitting the compute needed for advanced voice interaction into a hockey-puck-sized enclosure is also a technical constraint; most of the heavy lifting will run in the cloud, meaning the value proposition rests on the software layer, not the silicon inside the puck.
The smart-speaker category itself has been a graveyard for margins. Amazon and Google have both struggled to make their speaker businesses profitable, and Amazon has reorganized its devices unit repeatedly. OpenAI is choosing to enter that category while burning billions of dollars a year, which explains both the push for new revenue streams and the decision to price the device at the premium end rather than compete with sub-$100 mainstream models.
The counterweight is execution risk. A $400 speaker with no screen and no local model has to deliver a conversational experience meaningfully better than what a user already gets by asking ChatGPT on their phone. Latency, wake-word reliability, and the ability to sustain a natural exchange without awkward pauses are unsolved product problems at this price point. Apple's lawsuit is a further wildcard — a preliminary injunction or forced design change could push the 2027 date further out. Neither Apple nor OpenAI has commented publicly on where the case stands procedurally.
The strategic read is that OpenAI is trying to own an ambient-compute surface before Google and Amazon can retrofit their existing speakers with equivalent chatbot capability. Owning the hardware means owning the wake word, the default assistant, and the subscription attach. If the puck ships in 2027 at $300 to $400 and even a modest fraction of ChatGPT's user base converts, OpenAI gets a recurring hardware-plus-subscription revenue line that its competitors cannot easily disrupt through software updates. The risk is that the smart-speaker market has repeatedly punished exactly this thesis — and that ChatGPT users, unlike Alexa users, already have a device in their pocket that does the same job.
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