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On the eighth day of Christmas…er, the eighth day of “12 Days of OpenAI” (a series of holiday-themed announcements from the company behind ChatGPT), OpenAI took to its now-familiar livestream on YouTube to announce a series of search-related updates for its signature AI chatbot.
Specifically, OpenAI just unveiled three major updates to its web search experience within ChatGPT, which was officially rolled out back in October 2024 after running as a separate, invitation-only preview website called SearchGPT for several months prior.
Here’s what’s changed:
- ChatGPT Search is now available to all users globally, even free users — when logged in. You’ll need to create a free account to get it, but once you do, you can click on a tiny globe icon in the bottom of the “compose” bar to activate it and get updated information live from the web in your responses, as opposed to before, when it was only available to paid subscribers on the ChatGPT Plus and above (Pro, Edu, Team, Enterprise) plans.
- OpenAI has updated the search results experience in ChatGPT so that prominent links to webpages such as Netflix’s or travel booking websites will appear before the rest of the generated, text-based answers written by the chatbot.
- Arguably the most impressive and biggest update is that users can now search by voice queries when they have Advanced Voice Mode activated (turn it on by pressing the audio waveform button in the compose bar at the bottom, which looks like a series of parallel vertical lines). This allows a user to ask for up-to-date information on travel destinations, the latest weather forecasts, and even ideas for activities (as well as, presumably, well, anything else in the world that’s not sexually explicit — ChatGPT Search doesn’t offer that functionality). ChatGPT’s Voice Assistant will respond in the voice you’ve selected for it to use among the 10 pre-set voice style options.
Also part of the second update: OpenAI has made it so that the ChatGPT mobile apps for iOS and Android devices now integrate with those platforms’ respective maps, so that if you search for restaurants nearby, it will use the system map app on your device (Apple Maps or Google Maps, respectively) to show the list of results.
Altogether, it was a series of useful if not blockbuster improvements, and should help ChatGPT users on-the-go most of all.
Already, OpenAI’s presenters teased that tomorrow, on the ninth day of 12 Days of OpenAI, there will be news to share for third-party developers building atop OpenAI’s platform and application programming interfaces (APIs). Stay tuned, and we’ll keep you posted on the latest.
