OpenAI launches free ChatGPT app for iOS

OpenAI has launched the ChatGPT app for iOS, promising that an Android version will be coming "soon". The app is free to use, synchronizes chat history with the Internet, and supports voice input supported by OpenAI's open-source Whisper speech recognition model. The app works on iPhone and iPad and can be downloaded from the App Store here. OpenAI says the app will be distributed in the US first, followed by other countries "in the coming weeks."

OpenAI has not previously hinted at a mobile app, but it makes sense given the incredible popularity of ChatGPT. The artificial intelligence chatbot was launched last November, but its usage has skyrocketed. According to some outside estimates, the app had attracted 100 million users by January this year, though OpenAI has never confirmed those numbers.

The app launch is interesting given OpenAI's somewhat ambiguous approach to positioning ChatGPT in the market. Although the chatbot was launched as an experiment, it has quickly found a consumer audience that uses it for a variety of tasks, from cheating on college essays to solving business problems. In February, OpenAI launched a premium subscription to the ChatGPT Plus app that offers priority access and responses generated using the company's latest GPT-4 language model. It costs $20 per month.

Until now, the best way to access OpenAI language models on mobile devices has been to use Microsoft's Bing app, which offers access to the company's GPT-4-powered chatbot. An official app from ChatGPT would likely draw some of those users away from Microsoft, which uses access to its chatbot as a way to draw people to Bing and Edge. The launch of an official ChatGPT will also hopefully stop people from signing up for countless spam and fake apps that purport to offer access to the chatbot on mobile devices.

Of course, ChatGPT has the same problems on mobile devices as it does on the web. These include the bot's tendency to fabricate information with complete confidence, as well as privacy concerns. OpenAI only recently gave users the option to make conversations private, and the app's home screen (as shown above) still carries a warning that users should not share "sensitive information" in the app.