OpenAI API Foundations: Build Your First AI Application

The OpenAI platform provides four core APIs covering text, images, audio, and semantic search. This course covers all four through a single, practical project: an internal knowledge search tool that answers employee questions using text generation, vision, voice, structured output, and semantic search. Connect the Responses API to live web data, custom functions, and third-party services through MCP. Add speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and image generation capabilities. All code runs in GitHub Codespaces against live APIs, so you finish with a working application you can adapt for your own team.

This course is designed for software developers and engineers who write Python and have experience building web applications or internal tools, but haven't worked with the OpenAI API yet, as well as technical team leads and architects evaluating the OpenAI platform for their organization.

Learning objectives
Use the Responses API to generate text, analyze images, process documents, call functions, and return structured output from a single endpoint.
Connect the Responses API to external data sources using built-in web search, custom function calling, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Use the Audio API to transcribe speech to text and convert text to speech within an application.
Use the Images API to generate images from text prompts.
Use the Embeddings API to build semantic search that retrieves documents from natural language questions.