OpenAI brings ChatGPT to your landline

ChatGPT is coming to phones. No, not smartphones — landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT), and OpenAI’s AI-powered assistant will respond as of Wednesday afternoon.

“[Our mission at] OpenAI is to make artificial general intelligence beneficial to all of humanity, and part of that is making it as accessible as possible to as many people as we can,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said during a livestream. “Today, we’re taking the next step and bringing ChatGPT to your telephone.”

The experience is more or less identical to Advanced Voice Mode, OpenAI’s real-time conversational feature for ChatGPT — minus the multimodality. ChatGPT responds to the questions users ask over the phone and can handle tasks such as translating a sentence into a different language.

OpenAI is offering 15 minutes of free calling for U.S. users, then the call just ends. The company notes that standard carrier fees may apply.

Beginning Wednesday, ChatGPT is also available on WhatsApp for those who prefer to text the AI assistant. It’s a basic back-and-forth exchange; given that it’s WhatsApp, you won’t find the customization options offered in the official ChatGPT app.

As with ChatGPT over the phone, you don’t need an account for the WhatsApp experience — but there’s a daily limit. Users will get a notice as they approach this limit, at which point they’ll be able to continue chatting by downloading the ChatGPT app or using ChatGPT on desktop.

OpenAI says it’s working on additional features for the WhatsApp integration like image analysis and web search, but the company didn’t share when those might ship.

“This came out of a hack week project,” Weil said. “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. We’re just getting started making ChatGPT more accessible to all of you.”