The code in the new ChatGPT app for Android hints at the possibility of using it as a virtual assistant on Google’s mobile operating system.
This comes as Generative AI-powered chatbots, like ChatGPT from OpenAI, have become a trending technological advancement in 2023.
There are various methods available to leverage ChatGPT on Android devices, including the official ChatGPT app provided by OpenAI.
Upon opening the app, you are required to type your query and wait for a few seconds as the app processes your request and provides you with an answer.
After years of being able to summon Google Assistant through gestures or voice commands, it is now necessary to manually launch the ChatGPT app to ask any question.
OpenAI seems to be aware of this issue, as they have added a new activity disabled by default in version 1.2023.352 of the ChatGPT app, with the future goal of addressing this problem.
Upon enabling and manually activating the new disabled activity, the same animations that appear when using the voice chat mode in the ChatGPT app are displayed.
These animations appear above other apps and do not take up the entire screen as the voice chat mode within the app does.
As such, it is expected that you can communicate with ChatGPT from any screen by summoning this assistant.
There are indications that this feature is not yet fully operational due to missing parts in the necessary code to launch the app as a virtual digital assistant.
A recent release of the app introduced an XML file containing the Voice Interaction service specifying the sessionService, recognitionService, and supportsAssist services.
This data is part of the necessary requirements to enable the ChatGPT app to function as a digital assistant. However, the app lacks the required data that allows the system to identify the associated service.
The ChatGPT app cannot be classified as a virtual digital assistant app until the necessary tags and declarations are added by the company in the mentioned XML file.
The presence of the XML file indicates that OpenAI intends to enable users to run the ChatGPT app by long-pressing the home button or scrolling up from the bottom corner after designating it as the default digital assistant for Android.
Thus far, the ChatGPT app is still unable to create custom invocation words or respond to current words, due to the need to access restricted APIs limited to trusted and pre-installed apps.
Given that Google is preparing to launch the Bard assistant, it is logical that OpenAI aims to facilitate Android users’ access to ChatGPT in order to prevent users from transitioning solely to Bard due to its ease of use.
