OpenAI Pitches ChatGPT Voice With Indian Voices Neer and Leher for Diwali Preparations

OpenAI is promoting ChatGPT Voice as a festive planning companion for Diwali, offering suggestions for budgeting, shopping and hosting family gatherings. The company says the feature, powered by its Indian voice options Neer and Leher in GPT-Live-1.1, can help users manage the many tasks that typically accompany the festival season. The Times of India reported the campaign.

How OpenAI Pitches ChatGPT Voice for Diwali

In a blog post titled "Spend less time planning, make more for celebrating. Get festival ready with ChatGPT Voice," OpenAI highlighted how voice conversations can help families organise Diwali-related activities more naturally. The company noted that preparations for the festival often involve multiple family members coordinating shopping lists, food preparations, guest arrangements and gift planning.

According to OpenAI, the availability of Indian voices Neer and Leher allows users to interact in a more familiar conversational style, making it easier to discuss personal traditions, family preferences and household budgets while receiving tailored suggestions. One use case focuses on documenting traditional family recipes: grandparents can explain recipes verbally, including those passed down through generations with imprecise instructions and measurements, while ChatGPT helps organise the ingredients and steps into a written format. OpenAI suggests users can have family members describe recipes in their preferred language, including Hindi, and ask ChatGPT to seek clarification when quantities or cooking instructions are unclear.

The company also recommends using ChatGPT Voice to create a Diwali spending plan. Users can discuss their overall festival budget, mention expenses already incurred, and ask the chatbot to allocate the remaining funds across categories such as gifts, groceries, decorations and miscellaneous costs. For gift shopping, ChatGPT can suggest options based on a recipient's interests, lifestyle and the buyer's budget, and OpenAI says users can seek recommendations while browsing in shopping centres by describing the people they need gifts for and setting a spending limit.

OpenAI's suggestions extend to managing Diwali gatherings. The company says ChatGPT Voice can assist users in creating menus that accommodate dietary restrictions, children's preferences and preparation schedules, and can help hosts organise to-do lists, structure shopping trips based on available time, and recommend ways to divide responsibilities among family members. OpenAI also highlighted the feature's ability to help users adapt when additional guests arrive at short notice, by explaining the dishes already being prepared, available ingredients and the time remaining before an event.

OpenAI's Enterprise Partnerships and Funding

OpenAI signed a flagship strategic partnership with HP Inc. in June 2026 to deploy the OpenAI Frontier enterprise platform across HP's global operations for customer experience, internal productivity and software development, according to akta.pro company records. The same records show a $20 billion contract with Cerebras for compute capacity, with Cerebras providing inference compute for OpenAI models and GPT-5.6 Sol launching on Cerebras hardware achieving up to 750 tokens per second. OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round in April 2026, the largest private market raise in history, led by Amazon with $50 billion, Nvidia with $30 billion and SoftBank with $30 billion, with Microsoft, BlackRock, Blackstone, Sequoia and Temasek participating.

Earlier OpenAI Product and Business Moves

In October 2026, The Times of India reported that Alexander Embiricos, whose startup Multi OpenAI acquired in 2024, became product lead for Dots, OpenAI's personal AI agent, after leading Codex, an AI coding agent. In the same month, THE DECODER reported that OpenAI is offering discounts up to 90 percent to attract customers from Anthropic, with companies including Rippling, Replit and DataCamp shifting more AI spending. The Cool Down reported in October 2026 that an OpenAI model decoded a 217-year-old Napoleonic cipher from a single scanned image, reconstructing a March 1809 battlefield briefing after transcribing 24 lines and sorting 155 unique signs.