Apple fans who want to enjoy the fruits of artificial intelligence away from their Macs and iPhones now have a wrist-mounted option, with the launch of an AI app for Apple Watch called Petey.
The app, which costs $4.99 in the US and £3.99 in the UK and was previously known as watchGPT (which makes a difference when trying to find it in alphabetical listings – it is under W, not P), answers user questions, and generates text in response to prompts. It’s currently rated 3.1 out of 5 on the US App Store, with some cautiously positive reviews.
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In our testing, the app was fast and produced interesting and plausible results, albeit with the usual limitations and quirks that readers will likely experience from similar apps on other platforms. Asked to write a comedian-style summary of Margaret Thatcher’s career, for example, he almost instantly came up with this less than hilarious offer:
“Ah yes, Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady of British politics. She was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and she got things done! She privatized just about everything, attacked unions like it was a mole game and led her country through the Falklands War. Love her or hate her, you can’t deny she made history. Although some might say his greatest legacy was his hair, because let’s face it, that thing was immovable.
I was most impressed with Petey’s attempt at a Valentine’s Day poem in the style of Philip Larkin, although the rhyme scheme is unconvincing:
Love again: ironically ruthless, heavy with balm,
More intense, colder to the heart,
When the kisses freeze and the faces calm down
In glassy-eyed surprise, before
A new emotion defines the psalm
To love everything once again.
No gifts, no cards, no fancy meals,
Just solid gold, unerring trust,
An unshakeable love that nothing can steal,
Because that is what makes us righteous.
A bond so deep it makes us feel
That we’re never truly lost.
The app’s developers may be hoping that Petey can replace the often unreliable Siri as watch owners’ digital assistant, and to that end offers a complication for the app on most watch faces. This means you can access it with just a tap like Siri. Importantly, you can enter prompts using voice, but as some reviewers note, it’s a shame that’s not the default; this means that a second press is required before you can start speaking. (Actually, you have to tap a third time to confirm you’re done speaking; it can’t infer that from the silence, which isn’t very smart.)
It is speculated that Apple is working on an AI itself, which could one day be deployed on the Apple Watch, but although it has “led the AI arms race” in terms of acquisitions there are three years, the company is publicly lagging behind its competitors in this regard. As we reported last month, those hoping for a ChatGPT competitor at WWDC 2023 will likely be disappointed.
