ChatGPT officially has an application on iPhone and iPad, Android devices have to wait a little longer

After a while causing a stir in cyberspace, the popular AI application ChatGPT is officially available on iOS for Apple's iPhone and iPad devices. Previously, users could only access ChatGPT through the website (chat.openai.com) while on mobile devices, the best way to use ChatGPT was through Microsoft's Bing app.

ChatGPT on iOS

The iOS app for ChatGPT kicks off the scaling process across hardware devices. OpenAI also promises that an Android version will be available soon. The app is free to use, syncs chat history with the web, and features voice input, powered by OpenAI's Whisper open source speech recognition model.

The app works on both iPhone and iPad and can be downloaded from the App Store. OpenAI says it will roll out the app in the US first, and will expand to other countries 'in the next few weeks'.

OpenAI didn't previously hint that a mobile app would launch, but it makes sense given the incredible popularity of ChatGPT. Chatbot AI launched last November but has already been used a lot. Some outside estimates suggest that the app attracted 100 million users in January of this year, although OpenAI has never confirmed these numbers.

What does ChatGPT intend?

The launch of the app is exciting, considering OpenAI's somewhat contradictory approach to positioning ChatGPT in the market. Although the chatbot launched as an experiment, it quickly found an audience of consumers using bots for everything from cheating on college essays to business applications.

In February, OpenAI launched a premium subscription to the app, ChatGPT Plus, which provides priority access and responses generated using the company's latest language model, GPT-4. It costs 20 USD a month. The landing on iOS shows that this application has great ambitions in becoming a tool to support users in everything, even replacing Google in the future. With more than 1 billion active iOS devices, ChatGPT has a huge opportunity and the miraculous growth rate in the past time has proven that the situation will change very quickly.

Some limitations of ChatGPT

By far the best way to access OpenAI's language models on mobile devices is to use Microsoft's Bing app, which provides access to the company's GPT-4-enabled chatbot. An official app from ChatGPT will likely lure some of these users away from Microsoft, which has used access to its chatbot as a way to draw people to Bing and Edge. Hopefully the official launch of ChatGPT will also prevent people from signing up for the myriad of fake and spam apps that purport to provide access to mobile chatbots.

Of course, ChatGPT has the same issues on mobile as it does on the web. These include bots' tendency to fabricate information with complete confidence and fear of privacy. OpenAI recently gave users the option to make chats private, and the app's home screen (as seen above) still warns users not to share 'sensitive information' on the app. use.

Lesley Montoya

Update 27 June 2023