ChatGPT Could Soon Replace Google Assistant On Your Android Phone
Mishal Rahman / Android Authority
TL; Doctor
- If you want to ask a ChatGPT question from your Android phone, you need to visit the OpenAI website or open their app.
- Instead, you can easily access Google Assistant from any screen using gestures or voice commands.
- The ChatGPT app code suggests that it could be the default digital assistant app, making it easier to interact with the chatbot.
The hottest tech trend in 2023 is generative artificial intelligence, led by chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT. There are many ways to use ChatGPT on your Android phone, the easiest being to use the official OpenAI ChatGPT app for Android. After opening the app, you simply type or dictate your request, then wait a few seconds for the chatbot to process it and respond. After years of calling Google Assistant using gestures or spoken keywords, manually launching the ChatGPT app to call a chatbot seems like a thing of the past. Fortunately, OpenAI seems to be aware of this problem, as the code for the latest version of the ChatGPT Android app suggests that you can set it as the default helper app.
APK analysis helps predict features that might appear in the service in the future, based on unfinished code. However, it is possible that these planned characteristics will not be published.
ChatGPT version 1.2023.352, released last month, added a new activity called com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantActivity . This action is disabled by default, but once you enable it and start it manually, an overlay will appear on the screen with the same rotating animation as when using the app's voice chat mode. This overlay appears on top of other apps and does not take up the entire screen like the voice chat mode in the app. So maybe you can chat with ChatGPT from any screen with this help.
However, in my testing, the animation never finished and the activity quickly closed before I could speak to the chatbot. This may happen because the function has not yet been executed or is controlled by an internal signal.
There is evidence that this feature is not quite ready yet, as the code needed to make the app look like a "default digital assistant app" is only partially present. The latest version of the application adds an XML file called assistant_interaction_service , which contains voice-interaction-service , which defines sessionService and recognitionService . The label also indicates that the supportsAssist service. These declarations are a necessary part of a program considered a "default digital assistant program", but ChatGPT programs still lack the necessary declarations in their manifest that let the system know which "service" to bind to. Until these services are defined with the appropriate metadata attributes and tags pointing to the XML above, the ChatGPT application cannot be designated as the "default digital assistant application".
Coded
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <voice-interaction-service android:sessionService="com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantVoiceInteractionSessionService" android:recognitionService="com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantVoiceInteractionService" android:supportsAssist="true" xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" />However, the fact that the XML file mentioned above exists shows what OpenAI wants to do with the application. By making ChatGPT the default Android digital assistant app, users can launch it by long-pressing the Home button (when using three-button navigation) or swiping up from the bottom corner (when using gesture navigation). Unfortunately, ChatGPT apps still cannot generate your own keywords or respond to existing keywords, as this functionality requires access to a privileged API that is only available to trusted pre-installed apps. However, given that Google will soon be launching Assistant with Bard, it makes sense that OpenAI wants to make it easier for Android users to access ChatGPT, so users don't switch to Bard just because it's easier to use .
By the way, it seems that OpenAI has another trick to make ChatGPT easier to use on Android. The latest version of the Android app also adds quick settings tiles, although they are currently disabled by default. The quick settings tile below appears to be designed to launch the new ChatGPT support mode based on the app's code. This code also assumes that this feature requires a ChatGPT Plus subscription, although with an active subscription we cannot enable assistant activity or quick settings tiles.
Mishal Rahman / Android Authority
When OpenAI announces this feature, we will let you know. Would you use ChatGPT more on Android if it was as easy to access as Google Assistant?