OpenAI launches ChatGPT Pulse: daily personalised updates for Pro user

OpenAI has rolled out ChatGPT Pulse, a preview feature that delivers a daily, personalised feed to Pro subscribers. Designed to move the product from a reactive chatbot toward a proactive assistant, Pulse generates a small set of visual “cards” each night that summarize information tailored to a user’s recent chats, memory and explicit preferences. For now the feature is available in preview on mobile to Pro subscribers paying $200 per month; Plus users do not yet have access.

How ChatGPT Pulse works

According to the details provided in the preview materials, Pulse performs asynchronous research overnight and presents users with five to ten briefs intended to bring them up to speed for the next day. Cards can range from quick, practical items  “ideas for quick, healthy dinners to make at home that evening” — to follow-ups on ongoing conversations or next steps toward longer-term goals such as race training. Users can expand a card for the full report and then ask ChatGPT follow-up questions within the same interface.

Pulse can also draw on optional connectors. When users enable Gmail and Google Calendar, Pulse can surface relevant emails, flag upcoming birthdays, suggest meeting agendas or recommend restaurants for a trip. Those integrations are explicitly optional and can be switched on or off.

Design choices and limits

Pulse intentionally limits daily output. The interface includes a deliberate stop message — “Great, that’s it for today.” — a design choice intended to distinguish the product from attention-driven social feeds. OpenAI characterises Pulse as the first step toward a more agentic assistant: long-term product goals include richer integrations and actions such as making reservations or drafting emails for user approval, though those capabilities are presented as a future aim rather than a present feature.

The preview materials also underline practical constraints. OpenAI has positioned some of its new offerings, including Pulse, as “compute-intensive” and has limited access to its highest-tier subscribers while it optimises the service. The company says it is expanding infrastructure capacity and is working with partners to build additional data-centre resources.

ChatGPT Pulse: Early testing and accuracy

OpenAI trialled Pulse with small user groups, including college students, and reported that the feature became more useful when people explicitly told ChatGPT the topics they wanted to receive. The company cautioned that the preview is not always accurate and framed the release as an iterative step: the product will produce automated summaries and curated updates, but users should not treat every card as definitive without follow-up.

User control and feedback

Personalisation is not entirely automatic. The product materials emphasise that users can guide what appears by curating topics and providing reactions—for example, requesting “local events on Fridays” or asking for “tennis news tomorrow.” Pulse supports simple feedback mechanisms such as thumbs up and thumbs down to refine future outputs. The company also stressed safety filtering before any topic appears and framed the product’s behavior as “meant to work for you, not keep you scrolling.”

Pulse is intended to simplify daily information triage by surfacing potentially relevant items without waiting for a user query. That carries potential upside for productivity: targeted meeting agendas, reminders linked to goals, or itineraries assembled from scattered messages, but it also raises familiar trade-offs. Pulling details from email and calendar data can materially increase the sensitivity of the data being processed, even if connectors remain optional; control mechanisms and transparency about what is read and how it is used will be central to user trust. Pulse’s explicit limit on daily items and its feedback controls are plainly designed to counter the attention economy dynamics that product designers and privacy advocates often warn about.

There is also an editorial question: Pulse will aggregate and summarise information that users might otherwise get from news apps, newsletters or professional briefings. The preview notes that reports may include links and citations in the same manner as the company’s search-style features. Whether users will rely on Pulse in place of traditional news sources or treat it as a convenience layer on top of them is an open question the preview does not resolve.

ChatGPT Pulse represents an early, intentionally constrained move by OpenAI toward asynchronous assistance: nightly, personalised cards that reflect a user’s context and choices. The feature is limited to a $200/month Pro preview today, will not always be accurate, and is explicitly under development. The company frames Pulse as a step toward broader, more agentic capabilities while flagging the infrastructure and computing costs that inform its current access limits.