You can call or WhatsApp ChatGPT?

For the 10th day of OpenAI’s 12 Days of Christmas, OpenAI revealed that ChatGPT now has a phone number (1-800-242-8478 / 1-800-ChatGPT) that users can call or WhatsApp to ask the chatbot questions.

During the live demo, OpenAI used an iPhone to showcase its new capabilities but assured us it would work using any old phone or smartphone, including the old rotary phones. They see it being useful when traveling, especially, as it can translate into different languages, and users can call it to ask about landmark features etc..

It works similarly for WhatsApp: Users can ask it a question—what’s a recipe for pesto, for example—and it will reply with a text-based answer, although just plain text for now, images and web searches are coming to the feature soon.

This new feature perfectly aligns with OpenAI’s mission to ”make artificial general intelligence beneficial to all of humanity,” and to do that, they want to make AI (or AGI)  “as accessible as possible to as many people as we can,” so bringing ChatGPT to phones seems like a logical next step to encourage even non-tech people to start using it.