ChatGPT is coming to Apple iPhones and iPads with the launch of its official iOS application.

The app was announced today by OpenAI LP, the creator of ChatGPT, which said it’s free to use and can even respond to voice commands and prompts with the help of a speech recognition model called Whisper.

According to OpenAI, the app can be downloaded from the App Store now, but only in the U.S. The company plans to expand availability to additional countries soon, and it also revealed it’s planning to launch an Android version in the not-too-distant future.

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that has taken the internet by storm with its almost humanlike ability to respond to questions and prompts. It launched last November, initially as an experiment, only to become hugely popular almost overnight, with some estimates suggesting it had attracted as many as 100 million users by January.

OpenAI hadn’t previously said it was working on a mobile version of ChatGPT, but given the estimated user base and widespread fame the app has achieved, such a move certainly makes sense. ChatGPT is free to use, but the company also offers a premium subscription called ChatGPT Plus that provides priority access and generates responses using OpenAI’s most recent large language model, GPT-4. ChatGPT Plus is available for $20 per month.

Until now, it hasn’t been easy to access ChatGPT through mobile devices. Indeed, rather than use a clunky mobile browser, it’s thought that many prefer to access it through Microsoft Bing, which has integrated ChatGPT capabilities. Microsoft has been using ChatGPT to lure new users to its search engine, but by offering an official app, it’s likely that OpenAI may cause some of these users to stop using Bing.

One likely positive of this news is that it will put a stop to the reports of numerous spam and fake applications that purport to have integrated ChatGPT capabilities. There have been reports of dozens of such apps, and this week researchers at Sophos Group Plc warned that many are effectively “fleeceware” that trick users into paying for features that are already available for free elsewhere.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said OpenAI has invested a lot of money into ChatGPT and so it needs more users to help offset some of those costs. “Given the app-centric nature of Apple’s ecosystem and its incredibly large user base, it makes sense to have an iOS ChatGPT app,” he explained. “More users means more queries, more monetization opportunities and also more data, which can be used to improve ChatGPT’s capabilities.”

ChatGPT users on iOS should beware that OpenAI’s generative AI will likely face the same issues on mobile as it does on the web. These include sometimes very slow responses, particularly when it’s busy, and a tendency to fabricate responses when it doesn’t know the correct answer to a question.

Image: OpenAI