ChatGPT could soon replace Google Assistant on your Android phone

The hottest tech trend of 2023 was generative AI, led by chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. There are many ways to use ChatGPT on your Android phone, with the easiest being through OpenAI’s official ChatGPT app for Android. Once you open the app, you just need to type or dictate a query and then wait a few seconds for the chatbot to process and come up with a response. After years of bringing up the Google Assistant by using a gesture or by saying a hotword, having to manually launch the ChatGPT app to ask the chatbot a question feels antiquated. Fortunately, it looks like OpenAI is aware of this problem, as code within the latest version of the ChatGPT Android app suggests that you’ll be able to set it as the default assistant app.

ChatGPT version 1.2023.352, released last month, added a new activity named com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantActivity. The activity is disabled by default, but after manually enabling and launching it, an overlay appears on the screen with the same swirling animation as the one shown when using the in-app voice chat mode. This overlay appears over other apps and doesn’t take up the entire screen like the in-app voice chat mode. So, presumably, you could talk to ChatGPT from any screen by invoking this assistant.