ChatGPT launches 'Pulse' to deliver proactive morning briefings based on user interests and use

OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Pulse, a significant new feature for its mobile app that transforms the AI from a reactive chatbot into a proactive, personalized daily assistant. Pulse generates a curated morning briefing based on a user's interests, chat history, and connected apps, aiming to become the first application users check each day.

How the "proactive assistant" works

ChatGPT Pulse is designed to perform "asynchronous research" on the user's behalf overnight. Each morning, it delivers a set of topical visual cards summarising relevant information. This personalization is achieved by synthesizing data from three main sources:

• Chat history and memory: The AI learns from the user's previous conversations and stored preferences to track ongoing interests, long-term goals (like training for a triathlon), and personal habits (like dietary restrictions).

• Direct feedback: Users can explicitly "curate" topics they want to see (e.g., "focus on professional tennis updates tomorrow") and use simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings to refine the content over time.

• Connected apps: Users can optionally link services like Google Calendar and Gmail. With these connections, Pulse can provide highly practical insights, such as drafting a sample agenda for an upcoming meeting, reminding the user to buy a birthday gift, or suggesting local restaurants for a scheduled trip.

OpenAI's CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, emphasised the company's vision for this shift: "We're building AI that lets us take the level of support that only the wealthiest have been able to afford and make it available to everyone over time."

Shifting the morning habit

The new feature is positioned to directly challenge traditional morning information sources, such as news apps and personalised newsletters. The company highlighted that the briefing is designed to be concise, delivering only a handful of essential updates before signing off with, "Great, that's it for today," a deliberate choice to prevent the "endless scrolling" behaviour associated with social media.

Currently, ChatGPT Pulse is available as a mobile preview for $200/month Pro subscribers, with plans to roll it out to Plus subscribers soon. OpenAI acknowledges that the feature is still in its experimental phase and may occasionally deliver irrelevant information, relying on user feedback to learn and improve.

The introduction of Pulse is viewed as OpenAI’s clearest step yet toward creating an "agentic" AI. That is an autonomous system capable of planning and executing tasks on the user's behalf without continuous prompting.