OpenAI just dropped a new AI model that’s designed to sound like an actual, human conversation partner—and the company says it marks a step closer to AGI. For years, OpenAI has been investing in the development of AI tools that can speak in humanlike voices. That’s sometimes led to controversy, as when the company debuted a voice assistant that sounded suspiciously similar to Scarlett Johansson. The various shortcomings of AI assistants, meanwhile, such as their difficulty in understanding context, has become a fertile source of mockery on social media. Now the company is hoping to turn the page on its AI voice assistant efforts—and, it hopes, bring the technology to a more mainstream audience—with the newly released GPT-Live-1, which it calls its “smartest voice model yet.” Unveiled on Wednesday, the model is able to communicate in lifelike voices, sprinkled with subtle intricacies that inflect actual human speech, like sudden bursts of laughter and short intakes of breath before a sentence. But more importantly for OpenAI’s goal of boosting AI voice assistants’ appeal, GPT-Live-1 also knows when to keep quiet: It can be a passive fly on the wall, attentively following a conversation without chiming in every ten seconds. During these quiet periods it will sprinkle in the occasional “Right” or “Mmhmm,” to remind users that it’s listening.