You can replace Siri on your Apple Watch with ChatGPT. Here's how

(Image credit: Apple)

published 19 March 2023

If like me you wish Siri on your Apple Watch was more useful, Petey might be your best new digital friend. The $4.99 / £3.99 Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra app, formerly known as watchGPT, brings a ChatGPT-style chatbot to your wrist.

That opens up some interesting possibilities. You can ask Petey to write mails or messages for you, or to ask questions that Siri can't answer. And for faster access you can add Petey as a complication to any compatible watch face, enabling you to bring up the assistant with a single tap.

Petey delivers the same benefits and drawbacks as the web-based version of chatGPT: sometimes its results are absolute nonsense. I asked chatGPT the other day to write a quick biography of me and it told me with great certainty that I was dead.

Do you want chatGPT on your Apple Watch?

That depends on what you'd like it to do. Chatbots are usually very good at answering questions of the kinds my kids like to bombard me with, and having Petey read out its answers in a little robot voice is undeniably entertaining. The example used in the developer's App Store page is "how do I build a birdhouse?", and it's really good with that kind of thing.

With other queries, though, it's a lot more haphazard. You can ask it to write something in a particular style, such as some verses in the style of a famous poet or rapper, but I don't think the results are going to fool anybody's English teacher or impress your neighbourhood hip-hop heads.

And as I've already discovered, chatbots are very good at saying things that are completely untrue with absolute 100% confidence. Just because a result sounds plausible doesn't mean it's accurate, so I'd recommend taking Petey's answers with a pinch of salt.

Right now I think this is more of an entertainment app than an everyday one, but if nothing else it does demonstrate a possible future – and hopefully a near future – for Siri. We know Apple is working on better AI for its digital assistant, which I don't think comes close to delivering on its initial promise just yet. With tech giants inserting AI pretty much everywhere, Siri really needs to get a lot smarter very soon.

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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).