Unlocking the power of ChatGPT on your Apple Watch
In this article we describe how to get ChatGPT on your Apple Watch to maximise your productivity on the go. There is more than one way to gain access.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm in the past few of months. The artificial intelligence (AI) assistant was released back in November, but it already has several million users.
The chatbot is built on the GPT-3 family of large language models from OpenAI. In a sense, it is a model that was trained on a massive amount of text to make predictions about stringing words together. While this may not appear to be impressive, the end result is.
ChatGPT communicates with the user in a conversational manner. This AI bot can provide detailed responses to questions, write essays and even spit out computer code. Some consider it to be the future of internet search.
Make no mistake, pretty soon AI will be all around us. ChatGPT is only giving us a glimpse of what is possible. In the coming years, AI will transform many industries and make our lives easier and more efficient. It can automate tasks, analyse large amounts of data, and provide insights that humans may not be able to detect. Google beware!
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The current crop of virtual assistants on smartwatches includes the likes of Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Samsung Bixby. All of these can be used to quickly and easily access information on the go.
The disadvantage of using such services is that they frequently only provide barebones assistance or a hint to a website which can answer with more information. The problem with that is that it then requires users to open the link in their phone browser. ChatGPT, on the other hand, offers a much more comprehensive response without redirecting users to third-party websites. As a result, ChatGPT has the potential to be a great virtual assistant for limited devices such as smartwatches.
ChatGPT Apple Watch app
One way to gain access to ChatGPT on your Apple Watch is to download the app. It even includes a complication if you want to add quick access from your watch face. You can even share the outcome of your interaction with others via text, email or social media. The app does not collect any data, and it is available in English, Dutch, French, and Spanish.
The watchGPT app can be downloaded from the App Store. It requires a one-time $3.99/€ 4,99 purchase. The size of the app is 2.6mb.
Currently, the software is slightly limited. But the author of the plugin plans to update the app soon to be able to facilitate whole conversations instead of only one question at a time. The complication will enable input directly, you’ll have the option to use your own API Key, a history function will be made available. In time, you’ll also be able to use vocal input and have the responses read out by the app.
Workaround to get ChatGPT on your Apple Watch
There is another way to get ChatGPT working on your Apple Watch. You can use the free iOS app called Shortcuts. This is an Apple visual scripting application that is available on the iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS operating systems. It enables users to create macros that perform specific tasks on their device. If it is not already installed on your iOS device, you can download it from the App Store.
As described by Fabian Heuwieser on Medium, the procedure consists of two steps:
- Obtaining your API key from OpenAI.
Your API key starts with “sk-“. You can find it on this page. Log in with your credentials and then simply create a new secret key on that page and copy it. - Creating the ChatGPT Shortcut on iOS.
Open the Shortcuts app on your device and create a new shortcut. It consists of two parts. The fist is the input method – speech-to-txt or plain typing. The second is performing the API call to OpenAI and showing the response.
Here are a couple of screenshots posted by Fabian showing how the setup looks.
To save you the work, the other option is to simply download the shortcut to your iOS device from this page. Just remember to fill in your API credentials, otherwise it won’t function.
Here’s what ChatGPT looks on the Apple Watch.
You can use this very same procedure to get the AI assistant on your iPhone.
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