On Wednesday, OpenAI launched a 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478) telephone number that anyone in the US can call to talk to ChatGPT via voice chat for up to 15 minutes for free. The company also says that people outside the US can send text messages to the same number for free using WhatsApp.
Upon calling, users hear a voice say, “Hello again, it’s ChatGPT, an AI assistant. Our conversation may be reviewed for safety. How can I help you?” Callers can ask ChatGPT anything they would normally ask the AI assistant and have a live, interactive conversation.
During a livestream demo of “Calling with ChatGPT” during Day 10 of “12 Days of OpenAI,” OpenAI employees demonstrated several examples of the telephone-based voice chat in action, asking ChatGPT to identify a distinctive house in California and for help in translating a message into Spanish for a friend. For fun, they showed calls from an iPhone, a flip phone, and a vintage rotary phone.
OpenAI developers demonstrate calling 1-800-CHATGPT during a livestream on December 18, 2024. Credit: OpenAI
OpenAI says the new features came out of an internal OpenAI “hack week” project that a team built just a few weeks ago. The company says its goal is to make ChatGPT more accessible if someone does not have a smartphone or a computer handy.
During the livestream, an OpenAI employee mentioned that 15 minutes of voice chatting are free and that you can download the app and create an account to get more. While the audio chat version seems to be running a full version of GPT-4o on the back end, a developer during the livestream said the free WhatsApp text mode is using GPT-4o mini.
Enlarge/ An Apple Store in Shanghai, China, on April 11, 2024.
CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Apple said it complied with orders from the Chinese government to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China. Apple also removed Telegram and Signal from China.
“We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree,” Apple said in a statement quoted by several news outlets. “The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns. These apps remain available for download on all other storefronts where they appear.”
The Wall Street Journal paraphrased a person familiar with the matter as saying that the Chinese cyberspace agency “asked Apple to remove WhatsApp and Threads from the App Store because both contain political content that includes problematic mentions of the Chinese president [Xi Jinping].”
The New York Times similarly wrote that “a person briefed on the situation said the Chinese government had found content on WhatsApp and Threads about China’s president, Xi Jinping, that was inflammatory and violated the country’s cybersecurity laws. The specifics of what was in the content was unclear, the person said.”
Meta apps Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger were still available for iOS in China today, according to Reuters. As Reuters noted, the four apps removed from Apple’s China store were not widely used in the country, where WeChat is the dominant service.
“These apps and many foreign apps are normally blocked on Chinese networks by the ‘Great Firewall’—the country’s extensive cybersystem of censorship—and can only be used with a virtual private network or other proxy tools,” Reuters wrote. WhatsApp, Threads, Telegram, and Signal were reportedly still available on Apple devices in Hong Kong and Macau, China’s special administrative regions.
US House moves on forcing TikTok sale or ban
China’s crackdown on foreign messaging apps comes amid US debate over whether to ban or force a sale of the Chinese-owned TikTok. The House Commerce Committee last month voted 50–0 to approve a bill that would force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company or lose access to the US market.
US lawmakers argue that TikTok poses national security risks, saying that China can use the app to obtain sensitive personal data and manipulate US public opinion. House leaders are reportedly planning a floor vote on the TikTok bill on Saturday.
US lawmakers raised concerns about Apple’s China ties after the recent cancellation of Apple TV+ show The Problem with Jon Stewart. Stewart reportedly told members of his staff that Apple executives were concerned about potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence.
Apple pulled The New York Times app from its store in China in December 2016, saying that Apple was informed by China “that the app is in violation of local regulations.” The New York Times news app is still unavailable on Apple’s App Store in China, the Reuters article said.
“For years, Apple has bowed to Beijing’s demands that it block an array of apps, including newspapers, VPNs, and encrypted messaging services,” The New York Times noted yesterday. “It also built a data center in the country to house Chinese citizens’ iCloud information, which includes personal contacts, photos and email.”
WhatsApp will soon be granted access to explore the “full functionality” of the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware—sophisticated malware the Israeli Ministry of Defense has long guarded as a “highly sought” state secret, The Guardian reported.
Since 2019, WhatsApp has pushed for access to the NSO’s spyware code after alleging that Pegasus was used to spy on 1,400 WhatsApp users over a two-week period, gaining unauthorized access to their sensitive data, including encrypted messages. WhatsApp suing the NSO, Ars noted at the time, was “an unprecedented legal action” that took “aim at the unregulated industry that sells sophisticated malware services to governments around the world.”
Initially, the NSO sought to block all discovery in the lawsuit “due to various US and Israeli restrictions,” but that blanket request was denied. Then, last week, the NSO lost another fight to keep WhatsApp away from its secret code.
As the court considered each side’s motions to compel discovery, a US district judge, Phyllis Hamilton, rejected the NSO’s argument that it should only be required to hand over information about Pegasus’ installation layer.
Hamilton sided with WhatsApp, granting the Meta-owned app’s request for “information concerning the full functionality of the relevant spyware,” writing that “information showing the functionality of only the installation layer of the relevant spyware would not allow plaintiffs to understand how the relevant spyware performs the functions of accessing and extracting data.”
WhatsApp has alleged that Pegasus can “intercept communications sent to and from a device, including communications over iMessage, Skype, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others” and that it could also be “customized for different purposes, including to intercept communications, capture screenshots, and exfiltrate browser history.”
To prove this, WhatsApp needs access to “all relevant spyware”—specifically “any NSO spyware targeting or directed at WhatsApp servers, or using WhatsApp in any way to access Target Devices”—for “a period of one year before the alleged attack to one year after the alleged attack,” Hamilton concluded.
The NSO has so far not commented on the order, but WhatsApp was pleased with this outcome.
“The recent court ruling is an important milestone in our long running goal of protecting WhatsApp users against unlawful attacks,” WhatsApp’s spokesperson told The Guardian. “Spyware companies and other malicious actors need to understand they can be caught and will not be able to ignore the law.”
But Hamilton did not grant all of WhatsApp’s requests for discovery, sparing the NSO from sharing specific information regarding its server architecture because WhatsApp “would be able to glean the same information from the full functionality of the alleged spyware.”
Perhaps more significantly, the NSO also won’t be compelled to identify its clients. While the NSO does not publicly name the governments that purchase its spyware, reports indicate that Poland, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, India, Hungary, and the United Arab Emirates have used it to target dissidents, The Guardian reported. In 2021, the US blacklisted the NSO for allegedly spreading “digital tools used for repression.”
In the same order, Hamilton also denied the NSO’s request to compel WhatsApp to share its post-complaint communications with the Citizen Lab, which served as a third-party witness in the case to support WhatsApp’s argument that “Pegasus is misused by NSO’s customers against ‘civil society.’”
It appeared that the NSO sought WhatsApp’s post-complaint communications with Citizen Lab as a way to potentially pressure WhatsApp into dropping Citizen Lab’s statement from the record. Hamilton quoted a court filing from the NSO that curiously noted: “If plaintiffs would agree to withdraw from their case Citizen Lab’s contention that Pegasus was used against members of ‘civil society’ rather than to investigate terrorism and serious crime, there would be much less need for this discovery.”
Ultimately, Hamilton denied the NSO’s request because “the court fails to see the relevance of the requested discovery.”
As discovery in the case proceeds, the court expects to receive expert disclosures from each side on August 30 before the trial, which is expected to start on March 3, 2025.
