You can now call 1-800-CHATGPT

For the 10th day of “ship-mas,” OpenAI rolled out a way to call ChatGPT for up to 15 minutes for free using 1-800-CHATGPT.

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

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

OpenAI sees this feature as an important stepping stone for newcomers to AI, since the service represents a simplified version of ChatGPT compared to its web-based counterpart and offers a “low-cost way to try it out through familiar channels.” The company notes that existing users seeking more comprehensive features, higher usage limits, and personalization options should continue using their regular ChatGPT accounts through traditional channels.

Funnily enough, Google launched a similar tool in 2007 called GOOG-411, which offered free directory assistance by voice. The service was discontinued in 2010 without an official explanation from Google, but some speculate that it was shut down because the company had already achieved its underlying goal: collecting a sufficient database of voice samples to advance its speech recognition technology.

At the time, Google VP Marissa Mayer said it outright: “The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.”

OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson said the company won’t be using these calls to train large language models.