iPhone 15 Pro’s Action Button Lets You Replace Siri With Voice-Enabled ChatGPT: Report

The iPhone 15 series made its debut earlier this month at Apple's ‘Wonderlust' event, bringing in a host of new changes to the company's traditional design. Most notably, the new phones ditched the much-maligned lightening port for the standardised USB Type-C. iPhone 15 Pro models also did away with the series regular mute switch, opting instead for a customisable Action Button, that really just blows up possibilities of what you can do on an iPhone 15 Pro with the tap of a button. Since the Action Button can be assigned to an array of apps and functionalities, including the Shortcuts app on iPhone, pretty much every app can now be bound to it. And as some have discovered, you can now use ChatGPT as your voice assistant in place of Siri on iPhone 15 Pro.

ChatGPT, OpenAI's wildly popular generative AI chatbot, received support for voice conversations earlier this week, enabling it to have natural back-and-forth conversation with users. This feature, currently only available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers, essentially transforms the chatbot into an AI-powered voice assistant. Now, with the help of Apple's new Action Button, ChatGPT can easily replace Siri as the go-to voice assistant on iPhone 15 Pro. As ZDNet first spotted, the ChatGPT app on iOS can be bound to the Action Button using the Shortcuts app.

Simply download OpenAI's ChatGPT app from the App Store — it's free. Then, head to Settings>Action Button on your iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max, and then swipe to select Shortcuts option. Then, you tap on ‘Choose a feature' and simply select the ChatGPT app. This would bind the ChatGPT app on iPhone to the Action Button, allowing you to bring up the app from your homescreen with a single tap.

Since ChatGPT is now voice-enabled it can effectively substitute Siri as the default voice assistant on iPhone 15 Pro. As mentioned before, however, the voice features are only available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise subscribers for now. A ChatGPT Plus subscription starts at $20 (roughly Rs. 1,660) per month. iPhone users can already use the popular Google Assistant in place of Siri via its dedicated iOS app. The app can also be bound to a Shortcut, so that when you say “hey, Siri, hey, Google,” Siri redirects you to the Google Assistant for your queries.

Additionally, ChatGPT Plus users can now also surf the Web beyond ChatGPT's September 2021 cutoff date. OpenAI announced Thursday that ChatGPT users can start browsing the Internet and, essentially expanding the data the chatbot can access beyond its earlier September 2021 cutoff. So, now with the Action Button, iPhone 15 Pro users could also access updated information off the Web via ChatGPT. This feature is also currently limited to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers, but OpenAI plans to expand it to all users soon.