Exclusive: Leaked Factory Photos Point To OpenAI Relay, A Smart Speaker That Lets Meetings Follow You Home
Factory images point to an unannounced OpenAI smart speaker lineup with Home, Desk, and Room tiers, because apparently the meeting needed a physical body.
OpenAI has already put ChatGPT in browsers, phones, apps, desktops, code editors, and the part of your brain that used to remember how to write a normal email. Now leaked factory photos suggest the company may be putting it on the kitchen counter too: OpenAI Relay, a smart speaker line for anyone who wants to ask a question out loud and then immediately discover the answer requires a subscription, a clarification, and a calmer household.
VanFlip reviewed three manufacturing images and a draft retail grid describing Relay as a family of small white speaker pucks with subtle OpenAI branding, microphone holes, a glowing ring, and the calm appliance energy of something that will one day tell your father it cannot help him diagnose a mole without a better photo.
The unreleased lineup appears to include three models: Relay Home, a small kitchen and bedroom unit; Relay Desk, a heavier model with a privacy slider and a better speaker; and Relay Room, a conference-room puck designed to sit in the middle of a table until someone says, “Can we take this offline?” and the device quietly begins preparing a 900-word summary of why nobody should.
“Relay gives people access to ChatGPT from the room they are actually standing in,” reads one draft product blurb included in the leaked materials. “Whether you’re asking for a recipe, rewriting a Slack message, checking a school email before you accidentally sound furious, or trying to remember what the hell Randy agreed to in the 2:30, Relay is designed to be there, listening with permission, and occasionally asking if you meant teaspoons or tablespoons before your family eats paste.”
That last part is probably useful, unfortunately.
The Home model reportedly starts at $129 and handles normal smart-speaker jobs such as timers, weather, music, reminders, and explaining to a six-year-old why a volcano cannot be made entirely out of ketchup. The Desk model adds Meeting Catch, a mode that listens for phrases like “quick sync,” “circling back,” and “let’s be crisp,” then waits 11 minutes before asking whether there is an actual decision to write down or if everyone would prefer a decorative transcript.
Relay Room, the largest tier, is aimed at offices and includes a directional microphone array, admin controls, and a feature called Decision Foundry that detects when a meeting has ended with no decision and produces one anyway. Early sample outputs include “Legal to follow up,” “Marketing to make a doc,” and “Everyone to pretend Finance was looped in.”
A draft FAQ says Relay can be muted, although several early testers reportedly described the physical mute button as “too polite.” The same document says unplugging Relay will stop audio capture, but may cause the device to display a soft white ring for 45 seconds, which is exactly how a hockey puck would look at you if it had been trained on every investor memo ever written.
OpenAI has not announced Relay, and the company did not respond to a request for comment about the images, the pricing grid, or why a smart speaker needs a meeting mode with the confidence of a deputy principal. Still, the product makes a grim kind of sense: OpenAI already has voice features, meeting transcription, coding agents, and a customer base that will pay $20 a month to ask a chatbot whether an email sounds rude.
One thing is certain: the first person to say “Hey Relay, summarize my marriage” deserves whatever firmware update comes out of that little white hockey puck.