1-800-CHATGPT Is the Weird Christmas Present You Didn’t Ask For

OpenAI is nearing the end of its “ship-mas” spree. Now, on the 10th day of this Christmas-tinged AI extravaganza, the company is revealing its most outlandish product to date—an information hotline called 1-800-CHATGPT.

The concept here is pretty simple. Dial 1-800-CHATGPT, you’ll be greeted by a ChatGPT Advanced Voice instance. It answers whatever questions you throw at it, similar to how Advanced Voice mode works on a smartphone or in the browser.

OpenAI’s hotline is toll-free, though you can only spend up to 15 minutes on the phone with the chatbot each month. The same limitation exists when using Advanced Voice mode without a subscription in the ChatGPT app or website. Phone calls are recorded “so they may be reviewed for safety,” but OpenAI says that it doesn’t use these recordings to train LLMs.

Of course, the 1-800 number only works in the United States. But curious people in other countries can text the hotline via WhatsApp to spin up a conversation with a GPT-4o mini model.

Information hotlines are nothing new. There used to be toll-free hotlines for the weather, for general health queries, and for movie showtimes. Libraries and universities had hotlines for difficult questions, similar to the service that 1-800-CHATGPT is offering today. And 411 directory assistance is still active in North America, though there are millions of people who have never used it.

At the surface, 1-800-CHATGPT is just an easy way to test Advanced Voice mode without logging in to a free ChatGPT account. But it’s also an amalgam of 20th-century information hotlines. And in this sense, it’s squarely designed for seniors who, for one reason or another, are unwilling to test ChatGPT through web-based channels. If OpenAI is lucky, the 1-800 number will funnel a new class of customers to the ChatGPT app where they can set up a subscription and have conversations without a strict time limit.

However, I doubt that the average caller will treat this as anything more than a novelty. The only exception—and I hope I’m wrong—might be lonely seniors. If you’ve ever worked at a call center, you’ll know that there are repeat callers who try to stay on the line as long as possible because they’re desperate to socialize with someone. We see a lot of headlines about young men forming parasocial relationships with chatbots, and a similar phenomenon among seniors isn’t out of the question, especially if their first exposure to ChatGPT comes in the form of an Advanced Voice phone call.

I should also point out that this service, like many outlandish tech services, may serve as a proof of concept for future business ventures. A call center will be more inclined to license ChatGPT Advanced Voice if it’s already been tested in the real world, and so on.

Source: OpenAI