Now on Mac: ChatGPT can read and send messages for you
How many times have you found yourself drowning in a sea of iMessage, SMS, or RCS messages on your Mac, wishing someone would just organize them for you? OpenAI is now introducing a particularly intriguing solution that could change the way you communicate. The company has launched an official Apple Messages app plugin for ChatGPT, allowing the AI to read, analyze, and send messages directly from your computer.
How many times have you found yourself drowning in a sea of iMessage, SMS, or RCS messages on your Mac, wishing someone would just organize them for you? OpenAI is now introducing a particularly intriguing solution that could change the way you communicate. The company has launched an official Apple Messages app plugin for ChatGPT, allowing the AI to read, analyze, and send messages directly from your computer.
What can the new feature do?
The new plugin, available for installation under the public plugins category in ChatGPT, brings useful capabilities that can save you quite a bit of time in your daily life. From now on, you can ask the chatbot to check your calendar and draft a reply to friends with available times for dinner, suggest tracking messages from yesterday, find birthdays mentioned in chats and add them to your calendar, and even locate annoying spam messages that are recommended to be deleted from the device.
For this integration to work, ChatGPT requires extensive access to your system. You will need to grant it full disk access in the Mac's system settings, alongside access to your contact names and automation tools. The plugin uses AppleScript technology and accessibility settings to operate on the computer. The service is currently available to users of ChatGPT Work and Codex desktop versions, for anyone who owns a Mac with an Apple Silicon processor.
Caution: Do not give permanent permission
Alongside the convenience, it is important to pay attention to the safety and privacy aspect. By default, sending a message using the plugin requires your manual confirmation every single time. OpenAI explicitly warns users not to grant the plugin permanent and ongoing permission to send messages without supervision. This is a critical step to prevent a situation where the AI sends messages on your behalf without your knowledge or full control.
The launch of the plugin comes at a particularly interesting timing, as Apple and OpenAI are in the midst of a legal battle over the theft of trade secrets, and the level of Apple's involvement in the development of the plugin is unknown. Bottom line, if you have a Mac with an Apple Silicon processor, this is a powerful tool that can upgrade your work, as long as you make sure to follow security rules and do not approve automatic message sending.
