Forget Siri — Now You Can Just Call 1-800-CHATGPT
Credit: A2Z AI / Adobe Stock
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It was big news when Apple announced six months ago that ChatGPT would be backing Siri up, and while that feature didn’t arrive until last week’s release of iOS 18.2, it’s turned out remarkably well. However, it appears that this was only one way that ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, has been looking to extend the chatbot.
Over the past week or so, the company has been running the 12 Days of OpenAI as a fun Christmas-themed way of highlighting a series of product announcements. While some of these are what we’d call “inside baseball” and deal with technical advancements in AI models and research, some pretty significant ones are mixed in, too.
For example, on day 3, OpenAI released Sora, its AI video generation tool, and on day 5 — the day iOS 18.2 landed — it took the opportunity to highlight ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence and provide some tips on how to set it up and use it, from talking to Siri to Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 16.
On a more whimsical note, day 6 added Santa’s Voice to ChatGPT, and on day 8, OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT Search for everyone, following its release to paid subscribers and waitlist folks in October.
Now, for day 10, OpenAI is rolling out a way to call up ChatGPT and talk to it from any phone in the US, whether it’s a smartphone, feature phone, or even a landline.
This is done by picking up your phone and calling 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478). The toll-free number only works in the US, but you can also message ChatGPT via WhatsApp from many countries around the world using the same number.
For voice calls, OpenAI is using its Realtime API, while WhatsApp chats go through ChatGPT’s WhatsApp API to tie into the GPT-4o mini model.
The call-in feature is a relatively recent development that OpenAI spun up only a few weeks ago, according to its chief product officer, Kevin Weil.
This came out of a hack week project. The team built this just a few weeks ago and we loved it, and they hustled really hard to ship it, and it’s awesome to see it here.
Kevin Weil, OpenAI Chief Product Officer
Since toll-free calls still cost money for the recipient and ChatGPT’s processing resources aren’t infinite, there’s a 15-minute limit on the conversations you can have with ChatGPT over the phone. That’s a monthly limit, which means multiple calls will count against it. However, it’s also tracked based on the phone number you’re calling from, so landline, mobile, and work calls each get their own 15 minutes.
While Apple Intelligence lets you call up ChatGPT using Siri (you can go straight to the chatbot by prefixing your request with “Ask ChatGPT”), that only works on an iPhone 15 Pro or later model. 1-800-CHATGPT can be dialed from any phone in the US, so you don’t even need iOS 18.2, much less Apple Intelligence.
It’s also worth mentioning that the ChatGPT phone bot may not be quite as smart as the ChatGPT app or Apple Intelligence integration. That’s because It doesn’t support account-based features like ChatGPT search or personalization. OpenAI also says the knowledge cutoff for the phone service is Oct 2023, so don’t expect to get answers for anything that happened in 2024.
OpenAI’s goal for 1-800-CHATGPT is to provide a low-friction way for newcomers to try ChatGPT out “through familiar channels.” Existing users are still better off using the ChatGPT app.
On the upside, while ChatGPT will store the calls for “safety and abuse prevention,” and they are associated with the phone number you’re calling from, OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson told The Verge that it won’t be using these calls to train its language models.
