ChatGPT Old Lady Commercial: The Grandma Voice Ads Explained

The “ChatGPT old lady commercial” is OpenAI’s ad campaign for ChatGPT Voice. In it, three older women (often called “the grandmas”) talk out loud to ChatGPT to plan trips, check facts, translate, and get chores done. The campaign started in July 2026 with a film introducing the GPT-Live voice model and continued in late September with a sequel called “Get Stuff Done With ChatGPT Voice”. That sequel is very likely the spot you keep seeing on TV and YouTube.

The rest of this guide covers who the women are, what each ad shows, how much of it matches the real product, and why people are talking about it. Details are as of October 2026.

The two main grandma ads

Two films carry most of the campaign. They star the same cast but show off different things.

Reported runtimes differ a little from outlet to outlet, and shorter cut-downs air on TV. Treat the lengths as approximate.

The July film: introducing GPT-Live

Branding in Asia and Reel 360 describe the first film as a long, conversational piece. The three women move back and forth between planning a holiday to Santorini, checking facts for a lecture, and translating French in real time. The point is that they talk to ChatGPT the way they would talk to a friend instead of giving it stiff commands.

Reel 360 reports that OpenAI made the film in-house. Coverage quotes Brandon McGraw, OpenAI’s interim chief marketing officer for consumer and hardware, who says the new model can listen, pause and respond with better timing. Secondary reporting also has him calling the grandmothers warm, fun and universally recognisable. These quotes come from trade press, not from an OpenAI post I could check directly, so the exact wording may differ.

The September sequel: “Get Stuff Done”

On September 29, 2026, the same three women came back for a shorter film about ChatGPT Voice doing tasks instead of only answering questions. According to The Drum and Media & Marketing:

• Constance Brenner asks ChatGPT to check her accounts for duplicate charges. It finds she is paying twice for a magazine, and she has it cancel one.
• Lavelle Roby is throwing a vase on a pottery wheel when she asks ChatGPT to build her a website. Moments later “Lavelle’s Pottery” is up on her laptop.
• Other scenes in the campaign reportedly include booking a sailboat and chasing a refund.

Coverage connects the sequel to recent product changes: OpenAI had just expanded ChatGPT Voice so it can work with apps and plugins and with ChatGPT Work.

Who the “old ladies” are

The women are SJ Mendelson, Lavelle Roby and Constance Brenner. They are professional actors with long screen careers, not random users or AI-generated people. The Drum notes that they appear under their own names, which explains why the pottery site in the ad is called “Lavelle’s Pottery”.

There is also a grandpa version

If you are in the UK, you may have seen three older men in the same format. Trade outlets including DecisionMarketing report a UK “Get Stuff Done” campaign starring three grandfathers. They say it was developed with the agency MindsEye and shot in London. It seems to be a market-specific companion to the US grandma films, but coverage of it is thinner, so some details are less certain.

What ChatGPT Voice can do

The ads are built around a real product launch. IT Brief UK and other launch coverage report that OpenAI released GPT-Live on July 8, 2026. Here is what was reported:

• Full-duplex conversation. GPT-Live can keep listening while it talks. It decides moment by moment whether to keep listening, speak, pause, or let you interrupt. This is why the women in the ad can talk over it naturally.
• Harder work handed off in the background. For web searches, deeper reasoning or multi-step tasks, the voice model passes the job to a larger model (GPT-5.5 at launch) and keeps chatting while the answer is prepared.
• Visual cards for topics like weather, stocks and sports appear while you speak.
• Remastered voices. OpenAI updated ChatGPT’s nine built-in voices.
• Plans. GPT-Live-1 is reported as the default voice model for Go, Plus and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini as the default for Free users. Some reports said the Free rollout was still underway at launch.

A fair caveat: ads show best-case results. Tasks like cancelling a subscription or building a website depend on which apps you have connected and on your plan. Check what your own account can do before you rely on it for anything involving money.

How to try ChatGPT Voice yourself

1. Install or update the official ChatGPT app (iOS or Android), or open ChatGPT on the web.
2. Sign in to your own account.
3. Tap the voice button next to the message box to start a spoken conversation.
4. Speak normally. You can interrupt, change topics, or ask it to slow down.

Button placement and plan limits change often, so the layout may look a bit different on your device.

Why people are talking about the ad

The campaign has been on heavy rotation, and the reaction is mixed:

• Fans like that it shows older people as capable and curious. Several trade writers framed it as a break from the “lonely granny” cliché.
• Critics say it airs too often. A YouTube commentary uploaded on October 15, 2026 calls the grandma ads spammy and “terrible”, and TikTok has plenty of “annoying ChatGPT commercial” posts.
• Some worry about targeting. A September 2026 student opinion piece argues that casting only older women aims the product at older viewers in a risky way, especially given broader worries about AI voice scams targeting seniors.

Each of these is opinion, not a finding about the product. They do explain why the search is spiking.

Don’t confuse it with these

Two other “ChatGPT plus older woman” stories come up in searches:

• A 2024 viral clip of a 90-year-old woman chatting with ChatGPT, covered by El Imparcial. That was a real conversation, not an OpenAI ad.
• Ads inside ChatGPT. In October 2026 OpenAI began showing advertisers’ visual ads next to image-generation results in the US, as TechCrunch reported. That is about ads in the app and has nothing to do with the grandma commercials.

The bottom line

The “old lady” commercial is OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice campaign starring actors SJ Mendelson, Lavelle Roby and Constance Brenner. It launched in July 2026 with GPT-Live and continued with the September “Get Stuff Done” sequel. The features it shows, natural back-and-forth voice chat and spoken requests that trigger real tasks, match what OpenAI announced. How well they work for you depends on your plan and connected apps.