Source: The Verge
OpenAI has put out a ChatGPT app for iOS and said that an Android version will be out “soon.” The app is free to use and syncs your chat data with the web. You can also use your voice to send messages, which is made possible by the open-source speech recognition model Whisper from OpenAI. The app can be downloaded from the App Store here and works on both iPhones and iPads. OpenAI says that the app will be released first in the US and then in other countries “in the coming weeks.”
OpenAI didn’t say before that there would be a mobile app, but given how famous ChatGPT is, it makes sense. The AI assistant came out in November, but its use took off quickly. Some outside reports say that by January of this year, the app had 100 million users, but OpenAI has never confirmed these numbers.
The launch of the app is interesting, given that OpenAI isn’t sure how to place ChatGPT in the market. Even though the chatbot started out as an experiment, it quickly found a consumer audience that uses it for everything from cheating on college writings to business applications. In February, OpenAI released ChatGPT Plus, a paid version of the app that gives users priority access and answers made with the company’s most recent language model, GPT-4. Each month, it costs $20.
Up until now, the best way to use OpenAI’s language models on a mobile device was to use the Bing app from Microsoft, which gives you access to the company’s GPT-4-powered robot. Microsoft has been using access to its chatbot as a way to get people to use Bing and Edge. If ChatGPT makes an official app, it’s possible that some of these users will switch to it instead. The start of an official ChatGPT should also stop people from signing up for the many spam and fake apps that claim to give access to the chatbot on mobile.
ChatGPT has the same problems on mobile devices as it does on the web, of course. These include the fact that the bot is likely to make up information and be sure of it, and worries about privacy. OpenAI just recently gave users the option to make talks private, and the app’s homescreen (shown above) still tells users not to share “sensitive info” on the app.
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