After months of speculation, we finally know what OpenAI has been building with Jony Ive. According to Bloomberg reporting cited by The Verge, TechCrunch and Engadget, the company's first physical device will be a hockey-puck-sized, doughnut-shaped smart speaker with no display, powered by battery. The price is expected to land between $300 and $400, placing it well above a typical Echo or Nest, yet still below the HomePod. Launch is expected in 2027, with production led by io, the company Ive set up for the project. This is no ordinary gadget: it is OpenAI's bet on diving headfirst into physical hardware.
The partnership with Jony Ive, co-founder of the LoveFrom studio and Apple's former design chief, is not new. It was announced back in 2023, when Sam Altman was recruiting talent to build a device that would make ChatGPT feel "natural and intuitive". What stands out now is the materialization: the device will feature moving parts, lights, cameras and sensors that lend "personality" to the interaction, an attempt to make hardware react to the user's presence and gestures. Instead of a touchscreen, the pitch is a presence that communicates through voice, motion and lighting. It is Ive's philosophy pushed to its limit: form, material and technological silence.
The positioning is intriguing. Amazon dominates the segment with Echos starting around $40, selling audio as a commodity and bundling Alexa. Google Nest bets on deep integration with Google's ecosystem. Apple stays premium with the HomePod, but within a clearly limited reach. OpenAI is entering through a different door: this is not about sound quality, it is about intelligence. This is a speaker whose value lives in the conversation, in the language model speaking from behind the hardware, not in the audio drivers. If ChatGPT is the brain, Ive's device is the face that brain presents to the world.
Why a voice-first device now? Because language models have finally reached the conversational timing, with low latency, that makes talking to a machine feel natural. Old assistants were quizzes disguised as conversation. Multimodal ChatGPT changes that. OpenAI's bet is that, when the interface is not a screen, speech becomes the product. And nothing embodies that shift better than a physical, unobtrusive object that lives in the living room and answers when you call it.
The risks, however, are real. The always-on microphone revives the privacy debate: a device with cameras and sensors inside the home, connected to an AI model, is a magnet for suspicion and regulation. The smart speaker market has matured and, in some cases, saturated; Amazon even lost money on the category. Launching a $300 to $400 product into a niche that has shrunk is a test of nerve. Success depends less on design and more on convincing people that talking to AI on a dedicated device is worth the price. The question that remains: does the consumer want another gadget on the desk, or prefer that AI keeps living in their phone? The answer may define not only this device's future, but the future of AI hardware as a whole.
The business logic matters too. A dedicated device lets OpenAI own the interface, the data and the subscription loop that a phone app can never fully capture. It turns an ephemeral chat into a physical, sticky presence in the home, the way an iPhone turned the web into an extension of the pocket.
Sources: The Verge, TechCrunch, Engadget, 9to5Mac
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
