ChatGPT makes its debut as a smartphone app on iPhones

ChatGPT is now a smartphone app, which could be good news for people who like to use the artificial intelligence chatbot and bad news for all the clone apps that have tried to profit off the technology.

The free app started to become available on iPhones in the U.S. on Thursday and will later be coming to Android phones. Unlike the web version, you can also ask it questions using your voice.

The company that makes it, OpenAI, said it will remain ad-free but “syncs your history across devices.”

“We’re starting our rollout in the U.S. and will expand to additional countries in the coming weeks,” said a blog post announcing the new app, which is described in the App Store as the “official app” by OpenAI.

It’s been more than five months since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, sparking excitement and alarm at its ability to generate convincingly human-like essays, poems, form letters and conversational answers to almost any question. But the San Francisco startup never seemed to be in a hurry to get it onto phones — where most people access the internet.

That helped fuel a rise of clones built on the same or similar technology, some of which the security firm Sophos described as “fleeceware” in a report this week because they push unsuspecting users toward enrolling in a free trial that converts into a recurring subscription, or use intrusive advertising techniques.