ChatGPT retires custom GPTs and Advanced and Standard Voice on December 11. What to do

What leaves ChatGPT on December 11

Two things end in ChatGPT on the same day, December 11, 2026.

• Advanced and Standard voice. OpenAI’s release notes said on November 10: “We’re retiring Advanced and Standard voice from ChatGPT Voice on December 11, 2026.” Its reason: since GPT-Live arrived in July, “voice usage has nearly doubled, and virtually all people using voice in ChatGPT now use GPT-Live.”
• Custom GPTs. OpenAI announced on September 11 that it plans “to retire custom GPTs across ChatGPT plans and provide a migration path to plugins.” Its FAQ gives the date: “Custom GPTs are scheduled to retire on Dec 11, 2026.”

The two meet in one place: voice in a custom GPT runs on Advanced voice, and the voice retirement page says it does so “until their deprecation on December 11, 2026.” Here is what changes, as OpenAI’s pages read on November 12:

	Until December 11	From December 11	What OpenAI points to
Standard voice	A choice in Settings > Voice	Gone; you’re moved to Live	Live, on GPT-Live
Advanced voice	A choice in Settings > Voice	Gone from the picker; still runs video and screen sharing	Live, on GPT-Live
Custom GPTs	Usable, and editable by their creators	They and their GPT pages “become inaccessible”	Plugins, or a project
Your past chats	In your history	Still in your history

FedRAMP workspaces, and Enterprise workspaces with “a qualifying, approved deferral,” keep their GPTs until February 11, 2027. Everyone else, on every plan, has the December date. OpenAI hasn’t said what time of day either change takes effect.

Voice: what changes, and what stays

On December 11, OpenAI says, “Users will no longer be able to select Advanced or Standard voice from the model picker in Settings > Voice. Users who previously selected these models will be defaulted to Live voice.” Until then, you can keep using either.

The three work differently, in OpenAI’s words:

• Standard “chained three models together: a speech-to-text model to transcribe your speech, a large language model to produce a response, and a text-to-speech model to convert it back into speech.”
• Advanced used a model that “natively processed and generated audio, but the model had to wait for the user to stop speaking before responding.”
• Live, on GPT-Live, “can listen and speak at the same time,” and hands harder questions and agent tasks to OpenAI’s frontier text models while it keeps talking. At its July launch, OpenAI said you can pick “Instant for fast responses, or Medium and High when you want ChatGPT to spend more time thinking.”

Video and screen sharing don’t move yet. “Live does not support video or screen sharing,” the Voice help page says, and they remain for eligible subscribers in the iOS and Android apps on Advanced voice. OpenAI says “Live video and screen-sharing will continue to be powered by Advanced voice until GPT-Live has this capability,” without a date.

Your conversations stay. Voice chats “remain in your ChatGPT history and can be continued in text or voice,” with GPT-Live doing the talking after December 11.

The Voice page also lists what Live doesn’t do yet: “Preset ChatGPT personalities do not currently apply to Live,” and “precise playback-speed controls are not currently available.” Live’s allowance is measured “over a rolling 24-hour period”:

Plan	Live voice in Chat, checked November 12
Free	“Limited access to GPT-Live-1.1 Quip. Limits may change.”
Go	3 hours with GPT-Live-1.1 Quip
Plus	3 hours with GPT-Live-1.1
Pro, $100 a month	15 hours with GPT-Live-1.1
Pro, $200 a month	Unlimited GPT-Live-1.1, “subject to abuse guardrails”
Business Standard	3 hours, then 1.25 credits a minute
Business Premium	15 hours, then 1.25 credits a minute

OpenAI’s table has no row for Pro 500.

Not everyone is pleased. A thread titled “Keep Standard Voice Mode!” opened on OpenAI’s forum on November 10, and Android Headlines reports longtime users complaining “that GPT-Live jumps into conversations too quickly, cutting off their train of thought.” OpenAI has backed down once before: it planned to retire Standard voice on September 9, 2025, then kept it after the feedback, AndroidSage reported at the time. It hasn’t signaled any change to December 11.

Custom GPTs: what happens on December 11

“At the applicable retirement date, custom GPTs and their GPT pages become inaccessible,” OpenAI’s FAQ says. That covers GPTs you made and GPTs you use, including public ones other people made. “Your existing conversations with custom GPTs will remain accessible after retirement. You don’t need to take any action to preserve them.”

New GPTs are already off the table on personal plans. OpenAI’s GPT help page says “New GPT creation and publishing are not available on personal ChatGPT accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro,” though “users can continue editing GPTs they previously created if their plan and permissions allow it.” Affected Enterprise workspaces stopped creating GPTs on October 26.

If you only use someone else’s GPT, there’s nothing for you to migrate. OpenAI says to “check the notice on the GPT and any guidance from its creator about a replacement,” and warns that “Access to the original GPT does not automatically give you access to a replacement plugin.”

What moves to a plugin, and what doesn’t

A plugin bundles skills, which hold instructions, with connected apps. When migration reaches your account, a GPT’s creator goes to My GPTs and selects Migrate to plugin. The FAQ sets out what makes the trip:

Part of your GPT	In the plugin
Instructions	“become a skill within the new plugin”
Knowledge files	“copied into the plugin’s reference files”
Connected apps	“added to the plugin as apps”
Custom actions	Don’t transfer; they need a replacement app or “a custom MCP server”
Its chosen model	“does not carry over”
Drafts and unpublished edits	Don’t transfer; migration uses “the GPT’s latest published version”
Who could use it	Not copied; “The plugin starts private”
Your chats with it	Stay with the GPT in your history

Conversation starters aren’t on OpenAI’s list either way. After migration, “The original GPT remains usable until retirement, but becomes read-only,” so finish your edits first. OpenAI also says a migrated plugin “may respond differently,” and suggests comparing “familiar prompts and at least one harder case.”

What to do before December 11

1. List your GPTs. Note which you made, which you use, and who else relies on them.
2. Keep your own copy. OpenAI says “GPT creation and editing are available on the web.” Open each GPT you made there, copy its instructions into a document of your own, and keep its knowledge files somewhere outside ChatGPT.
3. Migrate the ones you need. Look for Migrate to plugin in My GPTs. If it isn’t there, OpenAI says migration “may not be available to your account yet,” and that you must use the account or workspace where you made the GPT.
4. Rebuild custom actions. They’re the part most likely to break. Check whether an existing app covers the job before you build an MCP server.
5. Share it again. A migrated plugin is private until you share it, and making a personal plugin public “requires a separate plugin submission process.”
6. Or use a project. For a GPT that was mostly instructions and files, OpenAI suggests a project: add the instructions in Project settings and upload the files. OpenAI’s project limits are 5 files on Free, 25 on Plus and Go, and 40 on Pro. A project doesn’t take a GPT’s custom actions or sharing settings, and old GPT chats can’t be moved into one.
7. Try Live now. Switch to it in Settings > Voice this week, on the kind of conversation you use voice for, rather than on December 11.

Taking a GPT somewhere else

A GPT’s instructions and files can live outside ChatGPT, too. Claude’s Free, Pro, Max and Ultra plans can “enable example skills and upload your own” under Customize > Skills, Anthropic says, and those skills also load in Claude Code when you sign in with the same account. Gemini’s Gems are on their way out too: on personal accounts they disappear on December 17 and become skills.

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file, and coding agents read the same format: Claude Code from .claude/skills and Codex from .agents/skills. Enjoy runs both on the plans you already have, and typing / in a message runs one of their skills (how). That suits a GPT that was a set of instructions for work. It doesn’t replace one that other people opened from a link.

What OpenAI hasn’t said

• When migration reaches personal accounts. Its FAQ says only that “Migration access may become available at different times.”
• How Free, Go, Plus and Pro use the skill a migration creates. OpenAI’s skills page lists skills for “eligible ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Healthcare, and Edu users,” while its plugins page says using a plugin “depends on your plan.”
• When GPT-Live gets video and screen sharing, or how you’ll start them once Advanced leaves the voice picker.
• Whether it will reconsider after the complaints, as it did in 2025.

We’ll update this memo if OpenAI changes either date before December 11.