For the 10th day of ship-mas, OpenAI launched a way to call ChatGPT for up to 15 minutes for free over the phone using 1-800-CHATGPT.
The feature was a project started just a few weeks ago, OpenAI product manager Kevin Weil said in 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 you can actually activate a few Google Voice numbers to spend as much time as you want.
The phone number is created using the OpenAI real-time API and the WhatsApp feature works with GPT-4o mini through an integration with the WhatsApp API.
OpenAI sees this feature as an important step for ai newcomers, as the service represents a simplified version of ChatGPT compared to its web-based counterpart and offers an “inexpensive way to try it out through familiar channels.” The company notes that existing users looking for richer features, higher usage limits, and customization options should continue using their regular ChatGPT accounts through traditional channels.
Interestingly, Google released a similar tool in 2007 called GOOG-411, which offered free voice directory assistance. The service was discontinued in 2010 without an official explanation from Google, but some speculate which was closed 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 Vice President Marissa Mayer he said it openly: “The speech recognition experts we have say: if we want us to build a really robust voice model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people to talk and say things so that we can ultimately train from that. …So that's what 1-800-GOOG-411 is about: getting a bunch of different voice samples so that when you call or we try to get the voice out of the video, we can do it with high accuracy.”
OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson said the company will not use these calls to train large language models.
