If you have been limited to the ChatGPT website to meet your writing and summarisation needs, you will appreciate the convenience brought along by the AI chatbot’s newly released app for Android. After downloading the app, users no longer need to go through the series of steps to launch ChatGPT on their web browser – instead, it becomes as easy as launching app from your home screen and typing your queries straight away.
While the app was launched on iOS a couple of months back, this is the first time Android users will be able to run it natively on their phones. However, at the moment the app comes with certain limitations. For one, you cannot use it to generate long-form content.
In this article, we’ll compare the ChatGPT app on Android with the web version, and help you decide which one may suit your needs better.
Registration
The app welcomes you with a friendly introductory message that makes your phone vibrate as the text appears on the screen, reminding you that this is a native app that takes advantage of your phone’s hardware. The sign-in process is similar to the web version and after it’s done you’re taken to its home page which looks vaguely like the Google Messages app.
Speech input
One of the new features that the app offers is the voice input option. You can see a mic icon at the bottom of the text field, which lets you speak your queries instead of typing them. This is something that ChatGPT’s competitors like Bing and Bard have already implemented on their apps, but ChatGPT is catching up. The feature supports multiple languages, but it may not be very accurate for some of them. For example, when we tried speaking in Hindi, it recognized it as Urdu, so there may be some room for improvement.
Limits on output length
ChatGPT for Android seems to be focused on shorter writing tasks for now. (Express image)
Another difference between the app and the web version is that the app has limits on how many characters it can generate in each response. If you ask it to generate 1000-word articles, it will refuse and suggest that it can only generate a summary instead. This is not the case with the web version, which can generate longer texts. Similarly, if you ask the chatbot to “generate a 500-word article” without specifying the topic, it will say that it would exceed the limit, which again is something that the web version does not do.
No GPT-4 support
Premium users will not be able to enjoy ChatGPT Plus perks for now. (Express image)
The app also does not support GPT-4, which is the latest version of ChatGPT Plus. This means that the app does not have access to plugins and is limited to information up to September 2021, which is when GPT-3.5 was trained.
Conclusion
Based on these limitations, a ChatGPT Plus user may not find much benefit from using the AI tool’s Android app, except for the voice interface. And if the user relies on ChatGPT for generating long texts, then the character limits may be a problem. But for a casual ChatGPT user, the new app may be a great addition thanks to its easy access and sleek interface.
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