I use ChatGPT and Claude every day, and lately I've found plenty of reasons to give Claude the edge. And just a day after Anthropic made it possible for Claude to send emails, OpenAI just added a feature that no other AI assistant can currently do.
ChatGPT can now connect directly to Apple Messages on a Mac, allowing it to search conversations, draft replies and even send messages on your behalf. While other AI assistants can help you write a text message, ChatGPT takes the task a step further with an Apple Messages plugin.
ChatGPT can now act on your messages
The new Apple Messages plugin arrived as part of an update to the ChatGPT app for macOS. It gives ChatGPT access to the Messages app on your Mac, including conversations synced through iMessage as well as SMS and RCS messages.
Once you've given it permission, you can ask ChatGPT to search your conversations or pull up messages from a particular person. More importantly, you can ask it to compose and send a new message without opening Messages and doing it yourself.
For example, you could ask ChatGPT to find your recent conversation with a friend, work out what you agreed on and send a follow-up. Or you could simply tell it to message someone that you're running late.
There are safeguards around that last step. ChatGPT asks you to approve the recipients and the contents of a message before it sends anything by default, so giving it access doesn't mean the AI suddenly has free rein to start texting people from your account.
This is where ChatGPT has an advantage over Claude
Claude has become more capable of working with outside services, particularly through integrations and connectors. But Apple Messages isn't currently among them. That creates a pretty clear dividing line between the two assistants at the moment..
Ask Claude to help you respond to a text and it can write a great response. But you still have to move that response into Messages and send it yourself. ChatGPT can now potentially handle that final step.
And texting is exactly the kind of mundane task where that difference could matter. I don't necessarily need AI composing heartfelt messages to friends or carrying on conversations for me, but asking it to send "I'm running 10 minutes late" while I'm dealing with something else is much easier to imagine using regularly.
There is a catch
Before you go looking for the Messages option on your iPhone, there's an important limitation. The integration currently works through the ChatGPT desktop app on Apple Silicon Macs. In other words, ChatGPT isn't suddenly replacing Messages or Siri on your iPhone. Which, let's face it, is where a person would really need this type of feature.
You'll also have to give ChatGPT permission to access Messages on the Mac before it can search or act on your conversations.
The takeaway
AI assistants are starting to take on tasks that we can easily do ourselves, but may save us a few seconds. Connecting ChatGPT to Messages moves another everyday task inside the assistant. ChatGPT is getting new plugins pretty regularly and while Claude Connectors are also good, it's updates like this that make the rivalry competitive.
And this is one ChatGPT advantage I can see myself actually using.
