I just tried Chat GPT's new 'Scheduled Tasks' feature — and it's the closest thing yet to a real AI assistant | Tech Radar

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I just tried Chat GPT's new 'Scheduled Tasks' feature — and it's the closest thing yet to a real AI assistant

Chat GPT can now nag you, brief you, and monitor things — here’s how to use it without making your life worse

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Chat GPT's new Scheduled Tasks feature announcement this week — the ability for Chat GPT to now send reminders, handle recurring work, or monitor things — caught my attention immediately.

After all, AI assistants are all predicated on being reactive and needing your initial input. No matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, the responsibility usually remains firmly on your side of the screen. But if they are to truly be assistants, they have to be able to help you out when you might not remember to ask for their help.

Scheduled Tasks do require your input to begin with, of course. But you can't tell Chat GPT to remind you about something later. You can ask it to send recurring updates. You can keep an eye on a topic and notify you when something changes.

Unlike a lot of Chat GPT features, this one truly seems to give Chat GPT more of an actual assistant feel.

I started with a basic reminder of something I frequently forget. I asked Chat GPT to remind me to practice my saxophone three evenings each week.

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Again, the setup was conversational. There were no complicated menus or automation builders. I simply described what I wanted. Chat GPT replied, "I'll remind you to practice saxophone three evenings per week. I'll keep the reminders encouraging and focused on making consistent progress."

Your Scheduled Tasks are all accessible from a new left-hand menu item, nestled between Projects and Apps, provided you are a Chat GPT Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise user. If you click the menu option then Chat GPT will suggest some things to try with Scheduled Tasks.

That evening I received the first reminder, with a couple of links suggesting songs to learn. Exactly the kind of thing that will help keep me on track.

If you've enabled notifications for the Chat GPT app on your phone, you'll get a notification that your scheduled task has completed. If you're using Chat GPT in a browser then turn on Desktop Notifications when it asks you. If email notifications are enabled for scheduled tasks in your Chat GPT settings, you'll also receive the result by email.

I then set up a more complicated evening reminder. I wanted a suggestion sent every day at 4 p.m. for a short but fun game to play outside with my child. The idea was to outsource a small piece of the fretting I sometimes feel to keep young kids entertained. Happily, not long before he returned home from daycare, Chat GPT suggested a fun and even slightly educational game of dinosaurs which he loved because of getting to run around and roar, but also helped him learn the names of several dinosaur species.

I use the 'assignment' prompt to skip any Chat GPT confusion

My third test was set for overnight. I told Chat GPT that I wanted a quick summary of local events or critical information to know every weekday morning at 8 a.m. Normally, this would involve checking several websites and social media. Chat GPT agreed to do so, and this morning I got a roundup of not only the day's weather, but details of yesterday's election news, the upcoming World Cup games, and how they might affect traffic.

Plenty of apps can recommend activities. What mattered was that the suggestion appeared before I had even started thinking about them or when it felt too late. Throughout the day, I kept noticing the same thing. Scheduled tasks were not saving enormous amounts of time. They were saving small moments of mental effort. Each individual task removed one tiny obligation from my internal to-do list.

That is the subtle trick scheduled tasks pull off so well. Instead of responding to a need, it anticipates one. Countless services can handle individual pieces of what happened during those two days. What felt different was having everything tied to the same conversation. That may be why the feature works better than you might expect. It remembers things so that you do not have to.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for Tech Radar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as Open AI’s Chat GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.

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