We are only days away from Apple announcing an official partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT-style intelligence to iOS 18 and perhaps a new and improved Siri.

Ahead of those announcements, the ChatGPT iPhone app has been updated so you can keep talking to ChatGPT while multitasking in other apps. This enables a much more powerful, desktop-like experience while using the iPhone.

Enabling background conversations with ChatGPT

This new multitasking functionality of ChatGPT is disabled by default, so you’ll need to turn it on manually. Here’s a step by step:

1. Update your ChatGPT app to the latest version
2. Open the app’s settings by tapping your name at the bottom of the sidebar
3. Scroll down and toggle on ‘Background Conversations’
4. That’s it!

Talking to ChatGPT while using other apps on your iPhone

Once you’ve enabled background conversations, you can kick off a voice conversation with ChatGPT then leave the app and keep talking.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

As you can see, the ChatGPT voice assistant is able to continue having a conversation even while you’re using other apps.

It’s unclear what impact this background activity may have on your device’s performance or battery life, but it’s a powerful feature nonetheless and makes the limitations of the ChatGPT iPhone app just a little less cumbersome.

9to5Mac’s Take

Regardless of what Apple announces next week regarding an OpenAI partnership, the ChatGPT app continuing to get major improvements that make it more useful on iPhone is a great thing.

As someone who uses the iPad Pro full-time for work, I’m excited to see a desktop-like experience become part of the native ChatGPT iPad app too. It’s certainly not as capable or accessible as ChatGPT on the Mac can be, thanks to macOS’s more flexible background activity permissions. But the closer we can get to that experience on the iPad and iPhone, the better.