ChatGPT coming to phones. No, not smartphones – landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT) and OpenAI’s AI-powered assistant will respond on Wednesday afternoon.
“[Our mission at] OpenAI is about making artificial intelligence beneficial to all of humanity, and part of that will be making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible,” Kevin Weil, OpenAI chief product officer, said during the live broadcast. “Today we’re taking the next step and bringing ChatGPT to your phone.”
The experience is more or less identical to Advanced Voice Mode, OpenAI’s real-time conversation feature for ChatGPT – except for multimodality. ChatGPT answers user questions over the phone and can handle tasks such as translating a sentence into another language.
OpenAI offers US users 15 minutes of free calling, after which the call ends. The company notes that standard carrier charges may apply.
As of Wednesday, ChatGPT is also available on WhatsApp for those who prefer to text the AI assistant. It’s a basic back-and-forth; considering this is WhatsApp, you won’t find customization options in the official ChatGPT app.
As with ChatGPT on the phone, you don’t need an account to exploit WhatsApp – but there is a daily limit. Users will receive a notification when they approach this limit, after which they can continue chatting by downloading the ChatGPT app or using ChatGPT on their computer.
OpenAI says it is working on additional WhatsApp integration features such as image analysis and web search, but the company did not say when they would be delivered.
“This is the result of the hack week project,” Weil said. “The team built it just a few weeks ago and we loved it, so they worked really hard to ship it, and it’s great to see it here. We are just starting to make ChatGPT more available to all of you.”