Patcay.com – ChatGPT has proven itself as a multitasking chatbot service, capable of assisting with school tasks such as writing, conducting research, and even planning vacations.
Now, its latest ability is to provide real-time information to its users.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced via its X account (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, September 27th, that the chatbot can now access the internet in real-time and provide direct links to its sources.
This capability will be available to ChatGPT Plus and enterprise users, meaning only paying users can utilize this feature.
For paying customers, ChatGPT will no longer be limited to outdated information, significantly enhancing its capabilities and reliability.
ChatGPT can access the internet through Microsoft’s Bing web browser. This partnership announcement was initially made at Microsoft Build in May and was later rolled out to ChatGPT Plus users.
However, after a few months, OpenAI removed this feature due to users exploiting it to bypass paywalls.
OpenAI mentioned that since its initial launch in May, the company has received valuable feedback from users. This feedback has been applied to the latest updates of ChatGPT, including following robots.txt and identifying user agents, allowing websites to control how ChatGPT interacts with them.
To enable this feature, all ChatGPT Plus and enterprise users simply need to select the “Browse with Bing” option from the menu choices under GPT-4.
ChatGPT Plus membership costs $20 per month. However, for users who require up-to-date information and accuracy, this price may be a worthwhile investment.
For all other users interested in accessing this feature, OpenAI stated that its availability will soon be expanded to all users. Until then, Bing Chat is a solid alternative as it is powered by GPT-4, has internet access, provides sources, and is free.
This announcement comes just a few days after OpenAI announced that ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak, referring to its ability to receive image and voice commands and issue voice responses.
The new search and response features will be exclusively available to ChatGPT Plus and enterprise users and will be rolled out to users in the next two weeks.