You can now call 1-800-CHATGPT

For the 10th day of “Ship-Mass”, OpenAI introduced a way to call ChatGPT for free for up to 15 minutes using 1-800-ChatGPT.

Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, said on the livestream that the feature was a project started just a few weeks ago. Users can now call ChatGPT in the US and send messages via WhatsApp to 1-800-242-8478 globally. The 15-minute limit is per phone number per month, so really, you can spin off a few Google Voice numbers to get as much time as you want with it.

The phone number is built using OpenAI’s Realtime API, and the WhatsApp feature is powered by GPT-4o Mini through integration with the WhatsApp API.

OpenAI sees this feature as an important step forward for newcomers to AI, as the service represents a simplified version of ChatGPT compared to its web-based counterpart and “there is a lower cost of trying it out through familiar channels.” method”. The company notes that existing users looking for more comprehensive features, higher usage limits, and personalization options should continue to use their regular ChatGPT accounts through traditional channels.

Very interesting, Google Launched a similar tool in 2007 It’s called GOOG-411, which provides free directory assistance by voice. The service was discontinued in 2010 without official explanation from Google. some speculations It was discontinued because the company had already achieved its underlying goal: to collect a sufficient database of voice samples to advance its speech recognition technology.

At the time, Google VP Marissa Mayer said it very clearly: “The speech recognition experts we have say: If you want us to build a really strong speech model, we need a lot of voices, spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. Is a spoken syllable. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that ultimately we can learn from it. …So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about: getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call or we’re trying to extract voice from video, we can do it with high accuracy .

OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson said the company will not use these calls to train larger language models.