ChatGPT brings AI to your iPhone, but UK and Android users will have to wait

(Image credit: OpenAI/Apple)

published 20 May 2023

If you've ever wished Siri was smarter, OpenAI has the app for you. Its new iPhone-only app brings the power of the ChatGPT system to your phone, enabling you to get human-esque answers to questions and possibly some creative inspiration too.

The app is currently available to US users and will roll out to other countries in the coming weeks. There's no iPad version, though, and if you're on one of the best Android phones you'll need to wait even longer: an Android app is apparently in development but there's no sign of a release date.

So what does ChatGPT do that Siri doesn't?

What ChatGPT can do on your iPhone

The main purpose of ChatGPT on iPhone is likely to be as a verbal search engine: it can give you plain-English answers to spoken questions thanks to its integrated voice recognition. Those answers needn't just be facts, though. They could be cooking techniques, travel ideas or even computer-generated poems that aren't irredeemably awful.

There could be work-related applications for the app too. ChatGPT is good at summarising longer documents and according to OpenAI, can even give you feedback on your ideas and help with technical topics.

This isn't the first time ChatGPT has been available on iPhone – there are multiple third-party apps, and Microsoft's Bing app has a ChatGPT-powered chatbot inside too – but it's the first official one. It's free to use if you're okay with the GPT 3.5 version; if you want the newer, more advanced GPT-4 that's $20 a month.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).