OpenAI has made two ChatGPT widgets available for the iPhone and both can be put on the lock screen. One of them even allows you to start a new ChatGPT Voice conversation.
The market for AI voice assistants is growing rapidly, but if you're an iPhone user nothing has the level of deep integration as Siri. Apple's AI assistant is getting an upgrade, with more details expected at next week's "Glowtime" event. This will include deeper integration with Apple Intelligence, but it still won't have the conversational skills of ChatGPT.
With the rollout of Gemini Live, Android users are now able to hold a natural conversation with Google's AI assistant including interrupting it when it starts to waffle. Unfortunately, the same functionality isn't available on the iPhone unless you open a third-party app. No saying 'hey, Siri', then just having a chat.
Thanks to the background conversation feature of ChatGPT and the lock screen widgets iPhone users can get a little bit closer to that live conversation experience and hopefully one day we'll get something equivalent out of Siri.
How to add the ChatGPT Voice widget
There are two widgets available from ChatGPT that work on the lock screen: one with a small pair of headphones in the corner and one without. If you apply the one with the headphones you'll have immediate access at the touch of a button to ChatGPT Voice.
If you're one of the lucky few to have access to Advanced Voice, the native speech-to-speech version of OpenAI's assistant, it will open automatically.
I recommend enabling background conversations in the ChatGPT app settings as this will allow you to continue to converse with the AI even when you don't have the app open, which can prove particularly helpful if you're using it as a writing aid working in another app.
It isn't perfect and as a long-term iPhone user I am somewhat jealous of Android users being able to access Gemini Live just by saying "Hey Google", but it's a step in the right direction.
I'm hoping one day there'll be a market for voice assistants and we can just use whichever one we prefer as our default, whether it be Alexa powered by Claude, Google Gemini, ChatGPT Voice, Hume EVI or a new version of Siri. I see this working in the same way we can already swap browsers or email clients and hopefully it won't take too long to arrive.
