the action button Makes ChatGPT More Accessible

Tim Hardwick reported last week for MacRumors the ChatGPT app on iOS can be opened by the Action Button on iPhone. This means, Hardwick wrote, users can “use it to jump straight into a spoken conversation, giving you quick, hands-free access to a far more capable assistant.” Apple added the Action Button with iPhone 15 Pro in 2023.

“A long press of the Action button will now open ChatGPT’s voice mode. The first time you activate it, the app may request microphone access. Tap Allow to proceed. After that, you can begin speaking immediately,” Hardwick said in his piece last Friday. “A recent update means voice conversations now take place inside the same chat window as text-based prompts, instead of switching to a separate voice-only interface. Responses appear in real time, combining spoken output with on-screen text and any visuals the model generates. This keeps your conversation’s context intact and makes switching between typing and speaking smoother.”

I decided to cover this piece because of accessibility, of course. Although I’ve sung the praises of Google’s Gemini numerous times in the past, I recently put the aforementioned ChatGPT app on my iPhone Air’s Home Screen and have been really liking it. It feels “smarter” than Gemini, and I like how there’s a certain symmetry to using ChatGPT for my AI wonts since OpenAI is for now the sole backend provider for Apple Intelligence. From an accessibility perspective specifically, that it is possible to map ChatGPT to the Action Button can make it an eminently more accessible way to launch the app—even more than my current setup of the Home Screen app and widget. (I prefer to use the Action Button to launch Magnifier.) If you’re someone with a disability who relies on ChatGPT for general knowledge or performing tasks such as note-taking, tying it to the Action Button makes sense for accessibility and expediency.

Relatedly: Allen Pike’s blog post on the greatness of the ChatGPT app for Mac.