Note: it’s now possible to talk to a newer OpenAI model (gpt-3.5-turbo) through Siri – if you want to use the newer, and much cheaper, version, see my updated post here. The new version seems to do better on some questions but worse on others.
Like many others, I’ve been incredibly impressed with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and how far language models have come since I was working on natural language processing research a few years ago.
But, also like many others, I’ve been regularly frustrated with Apple’s Siri and how it often fails to give useful answers to even the most basic of questions. This week, after a few too many unsatisfying Siri answers in a row, I started to wonder if it would be possible to solve the problem once and for all by querying ChatGPT directly through Siri.
It turned out that while the ChatGPT API isn’t officially available yet to pose questions to programmatically, the recent GPT-3 model is, and it’s also very powerful.
It also turned out that several people have written Siri shortcuts to interface with GPT-3, but I had a couple of issues with them when I tried them out:
- Siri wouldn’t always read the answers out loud
- The answers often started with a stray question mark, which was distracting when Siri did read the answer out loud, starting with “Question mark…”
I tried fixing the first issue by making a shortcut that included steps to explicitly read the answer out loud, but it turned out that a far simpler solution was just to change Siri’s settings in Settings->Accessibility->Siri->Spoken Responses to “Prefer Spoken Responses”:
Make sure you turn on “Prefer Spoken Responses” if you want to use this shortcut and have Siri read the answers out loud to you!
The stray leading question marks were an easier fix – I just modified an existing shortcut with a step that strips them out.
With those two fixes, the shortcut started working very seamlessly – I can now tell my phone “Hey Siri, GPT Mode”, then a question, and quickly get a response from GPT-3 read back to me by Siri.
You can download the Siri shortcut here to add it to your phone (and you can see the original shortcut that I modified it from here).
The shortcut itself is free to use; you’ll just need to create an OpenAI account here, create an OpenAI API key and paste it into the text field in the shortcut that says “Replace this with your OpenAI API key!” You can see more detailed instructions for how to do this in this article explaining how to use a similar shortcut. Right now, OpenAI is offering three months of API credits for free when you sign up for an account, and they don’t charge much once you run out of your free credits.
Once you’ve installed the shortcut onto your phone and pasted your OpenAI API key into it, it’s ready to use! You can use it under the name I gave it (“GPT Mode”) or rename it to your taste, to anything that doesn’t conflict with Siri’s existing commands.
To use the shortcut, say “Hey Siri”, then “GPT Mode” (or whatever you renamed the shortcut to), then say whatever you want to ask GPT-3. Siri will then, after a delay, display the answer and read it out loud.
Much like with ChatGPT, the answers aren’t always right, but they usually are, and I’ve found that the ability to ask my phone complex questions and get reasonable answers back is incredibly useful as long as I keep the imperfections of GPT-3 in mind.
Hopefully, the day is coming soon when Siri will have this kind of functionality built in natively! In the meantime, there’s this Siri shortcut.
PS – No pressure, but if you’ve found this shortcut useful, I’d appreciate it if you buy me a coffee!
Alex Kolchinski 
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