OpenAI has been launched iOS app for ChatGPT, promising to release an Android version “soon”. The app is free to use, syncs your chat history to the web, and features voice input, powered by OpenAI’s open-source Whisper speech recognition model. The app works on both iPhones and iPads and can be downloaded from the App Store here. OpenAI says it will roll out the app in the US first and expand to other countries “in the coming weeks.”
OpenAI hasn’t previously hinted that a mobile app is coming, but that makes sense in light of ChatGPT’s incredible popularity. The AI-powered chatbot launched last November but has skyrocketed in use. Some outside estimates say the app has attracted 100 million users by January of this year, though OpenAI has never confirmed those numbers.
The app launch is an interesting one, considering OpenAI’s somewhat ambivalent approach to putting ChatGPT on the market. Although the chatbot was launched as an experiment, it quickly found an audience of consumers using the bot for everything from cheating on college essays to business applications. In February, OpenAI launched a premium subscription app, ChatGPT Plus, which provides priority access and responses generated using the company’s latest language model, GPT-4. It costs $20 per month.
Until now, the best way to access OpenAI language models on mobile was to use Microsoft’s Bing app, which provides access to the company’s GPT-4-powered chatbot. An official implementation of ChatGPT could potentially lure some of those users away from Microsoft, which uses access to its chatbot as a way to lure people toward Bing and Edge. It is hoped that the official launch of ChatGPT will stop people from subscribing to Countless fake and spam apps which aims to provide access to a chatbot on mobile.
Of course, ChatGPT has the same issues on mobile as it does on the web. This includes the bot’s tendency to fabricate information in complete confidence and privacy concerns. OpenAI only recently gave users the option to make conversations private, and the app’s home screen (as seen above) still warns users about sharing “sensitive information” on the app.