Developed by OpenAI, the AI chatbot became a hugely popular tool almost overnight. Some features may also only be available in certain countries. AI tools are updated regularly and it is possible that some features have changed since this article was written. New features are being added all of the time, so read on to find out what ChatGPT can do and why it’s worth using. But when people need to figure something out, many now start with a chat conversation, not a search box.
Is ChatGPT any good?
The full capabilities of ChatGPT are still being explored by its millions of users. Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. This iteration is multimodal, meaning it can process text, images and audio. Much of the appeal of ChatGPT lies in its use of natural language.
What can you use ChatGPT for?
Occasional users of ChatGPT who ask informal questions or play fun learning drills will find the free version to be sufficient most of the time. Plus enables you to play with custom gpts, agent modes, and tools for video creation or data analysis. It provides a quicker response time,priority access even during peak times, and allows more extensive operations including file uploads, image creation, and in-depth research. When you’re starting a research project, you can use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas, outline papers, generate drafts, and refine language. Whether you’re writing code, debugging issues or learning a new language, ChatGPT offers guidance.
The feature is also still exclusive to ChatGPT users who have a Plus, Team, Enterprise or Education plan. Advanced voice mode becomes available on web browsers — before, it could only be accessed on mobile and desktop formats. The new features also provide enhanced analytics referral links if they enable their robots.txt files to interact with OpenAI’s site crawler.
How to Create Your Own Custom GPT Without Coding
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Intuit Apps Integrated With ChatGPT (November
- In the 2020s, the rapid advancement of deep learning-based generative artificial intelligence models raised questions about the copyright status of AI-generated works, and about whether copyright infringement occurs when such are trained or used.
- ChatGPT can be accessed through its web interface at chatgpt.com using almost any browser.
- Not only can ChatGPT generate working computer code of its own (in many different languages), but it can also translate code from one language to another, and debug existing code.
- As of 2025, ChatGPT’s website is among the 5 most-visited websites globally, and has over 800 million active weekly users.
- One of ChatGPT’s most powerful features is how you can tailor it to your personal style and needs.
ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. Similar to a phone’s auto-complete feature, ChatGPT uses a prediction model to guess the most likely next word based on the context it has been provided. OpenAI has already gotten a glimpse of this future through its o1 model, and the results have been mixed. AI agents represent stage three of AGI, enhancing ChatGPT’s reasoning abilities and enabling it to complete a broader range of tasks without human assistance. But it’s OpenAI’s plan to launch AI agents in 2025 that could bring it close to its ultimate goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), where a machine can behave and perform actions the way humans can. According to OpenAI, GPT-4 is capable of handling “much more nuanced instructions” than its predecessor, and can also accept image inputs.
Addition of E-Commerce Features (April
- While users cannot checkout inside ChatGPT, they are redirected to the merchant’s website when they click on the link.
- According to research conducted by OpenAI and AI safety organization Apollo Research, o1 provides more intelligent answers than GPT-4o while also attempting to deceive users more than any major AI model available.
- Advanced voice mode becomes available on web browsers — before, it could only be accessed on mobile and desktop formats.
- This iteration is multimodal, meaning it can process text, images and audio.
- A marketing team, for example, might coach the model on its brand voice guidelines and upload campaign analytics so members of the team can use ChatGPT to spot trends.
The languages tested were Polish, French, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Tagalog, and Amharic. In December 2023, the Albanian government decided to use ChatGPT for the rapid translation of European Union documents and the analysis of required changes needed for Albania’s accession to the EU. In 2023, OpenAI worked with a team of 40 Icelandic volunteers to fine-tune ChatGPT’s Icelandic conversation skills as a part of Iceland’s attempts to preserve the Icelandic language. On August 19, 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Go in India, a low-cost subscription plan priced at ₹399 per month, offering ten times higher message, image generation, and file-upload limits, double the memory span compared to the free version, and support for UPI payments. The integration used ChatGPT to write prompts for DALL-E guided by conversations with users.
ChatGPT is based on GPT foundation models that have been fine-tuned for conversational assistance. The ethics of its development, particularly the use of copyrighted content as training data, have also drawn controversy. It currently uses GPT-5.1, a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), to generate text, speech, and images in response to user prompts.
For mobile users, ChatGPT can be accessed either through web browsers or the official ChatGPT app (which is available for both iOS and Android). ChatGPT sometimes makes mistakes, it can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect information (a phenomenon known as ‘hallucination’) and its knowledge is limited by its training data cutoff. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, designed to converse in a human-like way.
How to use ChatGPT: A beginner’s guide to the most popular AI chatbot
At launch, the feature was limited to purchases on Etsy from US users with a payment method linked to their OpenAI account. In 2025, OpenAI added several features to make ChatGPT more agentic (capable of autonomously performing longer tasks). At launch, OpenAI included more than 3 million GPTs created by GPT Builder users in the GPT Store. ChatGPT’s Mandarin Chinese abilities were lauded, but the ability of the AI to produce content in Mandarin Chinese in a Taiwanese accent was found to be “less than ideal” due to differences between mainland Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Mandarin. None of the tested services were a perfect replacement for a fluent human translator. For more common languages, AI translators like ChatGPT did better than Google Translate, while for “niche” languages (Amharic and Tagalog), Google Translate performed better.
Despite decades of using AI, Wall Street professionals report that consistently beating the market with AI, including recent large language models, is challenging due to limited and noisy financial data. In January 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning banned any undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text in submitted papers. This includes text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion and large language models such as ChatGPT. In the 2020s, the rapid advancement of deep learning-based generative artificial intelligence models raised questions about the copyright status of AI-generated works, and about whether copyright infringement occurs when such are trained or used. The FTC asked OpenAI for comprehensive information about its technology and privacy safeguards, as well as any steps taken to prevent the recurrence of situations in which its chatbot generated false and derogatory content about people.
The plan costs $200 per month and gives users access to Open AI o1, o1-mini, GPT-4o and advanced voice mode. OpenAI announced the addition of product recommendations on ChatGPT when users implied shopping intent in their queries. The company also partnered with PayPal, one of the largest payment processing services in the world, to let users pay for their shopping directly within ChatGPT. Through the partnership, ChatGPT users will be able to find products sold by Walmart and complete entire purchases without leaving the chatbot’s interface.
Using voice, images and files makes ChatGPT more flexible and closer to how humans naturally communicate. You can upload images (photos, pinup aviator screenshots) to ChatGPT and ask it questions about them. According to Analytics Insight, users can click the microphone icon for voice, the ‘+’ (or paperclip) icon for images/files. Some versions let you upload images to ask questions about what’s shown, making it very flexible.
GPT-4o
You can try ChatGPT without an account in many regions, but signing in unlocks advanced features like saved chat history, conversation sharing, custom instructions, and higher usage limits. In my experience, the web version offers the fullest range of features available. There’s still a free version of ChatGPT, but the Plus and Pro plans can do faster responses and provide access to the latest tools. ChatGPT is not the same AI chatbot that first burst onto the scene in 2022. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.
Another study, focused on the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 between March and June 2024, found that performance on objective tasks like identifying prime numbers and generating executable code was highly variable. One study analyzed ChatGPT’s responses to 517 questions about software engineering or computer programming posed on Stack Overflow for correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and concision. Robin Bauwens, an assistant professor at Tilburg University, found that a ChatGPT-generated peer review report on his article mentioned nonexistent studies. In January 2023, Science “completely banned” LLM-generated text in all its journals; however, this policy was just to give the community time to decide what acceptable use looks like.
Trained on huge amounts of data, it can process written prompts and generate contextual answers which feel like you’re chatting to a human in real time. This doesn’t mean people have stopped “Googling,” but it means ChatGPT has peeled off the kinds of questions for which users want a direct explanation instead of a list of links. Free users are limited in how many images they can generate per day or in a rolling window (see OpenAI’s support page for current rate limits). I’ve covered the models and modes above, but here’s a reminder of all the core features (as of October 2025). This year alone, OpenAI peppered us with new models, modes, and features to play with inside the AI. The model has been trained through a combination of automated learning and human feedback to generate text that closely matches what you’d expect to see in text written by a human.
… It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations”, or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. The free tier is fine for casual users, but if ChatGPT is built into your workflow, you’ll need to pay for a subscription to unlock the faster processing and greater reliability of the latest models. Recent updates mean ChatGPT’s free plan now includes access to ChatGPT search and image generation using OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model, meaning you can get a lot done without a paid subscription. Its conversational interface makes it easy for almost anyone to interact with the chatbot, whether you’re asking it to summarize a report or generate an image. ChatGPT can be accessed through its web interface at chatgpt.com using almost any browser. For free, users get access to OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini model, plus limited access to GPT-4o and o3-mini.