ChatGPT Now Does Your Work When You Talk to Your Phone

On Wednesday, OpenAI said its ChatGPT phone app now does more than answer questions — it takes actions. You speak a request out loud, and it starts working: drafting a document, writing an email, or summarizing your Slack messages. The industry calls this an "agent" — AI that does tasks for you instead of just chatting back.

Pay attention to which version you have. Plus and Pro subscribers (the paid plans, roughly $20 to $200 a month) get a "Work tab" right on their phone. There they can build simple websites, create slide presentations, use a cloud browser, and even look at financial information inside ChatGPT. Free and Go users aren't shut out — they get plugins and connected apps, which let ChatGPT plug into other tools you already use.

The experience is smoother in small but noticeable ways. Voice answers come back with richer text, you can switch between typing and talking mid-conversation, and you can start a task on your phone and finish it later at your desk. That's genuinely useful if you're commuting, walking between meetings, or holding a coffee in one hand. Competitors are moving the same direction — Anthropic recently made it easier to hand off work between phone and computer too.

Here's the honest catch. OpenAI still keeps regular chat and its "workspaces" separate, so your quick questions and your actual work don't live in one tidy place yet. And most of the truly time-saving automation — the website building, the presentations, the cloud browser — is locked behind a paid plan. If you're on the free tier, expect convenience, not a virtual assistant.