The beta is inconsistently showing (required a few refreshes to get something to show up), but my limited usage of it showed a plethora of issues:
- Assumed UTC instead of EST. Corrected it and it still continued to bork
- Added random time deltas to my asked times (+2, -10 min).
- Couple notifications didn't go off at all
- The one that did go off didn't provide a push notification.
---
On top of that, only usable without search mode. In search mode, it was totally confused and gave me a Forbes article.
Seems half baked to me.
Doing scheduled research behind the scenes or sending a push notification to my phone would be cool, but surprised they thought this was OK for a public beta.
Amazon had an insane number of people working on just the alarms feature in Alexa when they interviewed me for a position years ago. They had entire teams devoted to the tiniest edge case within the realm of scheduling things with Alexa. This is no doubt one of the biggest use cases in computing: getting your computer to tell you what to do at a given time.
I'm sure it's brilliant, but I have no idea what it's capable of. What will it do? Send me a push notification? Have an answer waiting for me when I come back to it in a while?
I switched over to the "GPT4o with scheduled tasks" model and there were no UI hints as to how I might use the feature. So I asked it "what you can you follow up later on and how?"
It replied "Could you clarify what specifically you’d like me to follow up on later?"
This is a truly awful way to launch a new product.
Where are the release notes?
Edit: I suppose they'll be here at some point: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9624314-model-release-no...
These seem like extremely shitty release notes. I have no clue why anybody pays for this model.
Pretty useless so far. I'm not sure what the intended application of this is so far, but I wanted it to schedule some work for me.
It only scheduled the first thing and that was after having to be specific by saying "7:30pm-11pm". I wanted to say "from now to 11pm" but it did couldn't process "now"
What am I supposed to see at the link?
There is more information in these twitter threads:
https://x.com/karinanguyen_/status/1879270529066262733 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1879267276291203329
Founder of Cronitor.io here — if you’re a developer considering using this, would it be valuable for you to be able to report in to Cronitor when it runs so we can keep an eye and alert you if your tasks are late, skipped or accidentally deleted?
We support just about every other job platform but I’d love to hear from potential users before I hack something together.
The UI is different in the desktop app for macOS. The ability to edit the schedule task is only available in the web UI for me.
I got the best results by not enabling Search the Web when I was trying to create tasks. It confuses the model. But scheduled tasks can successfully search the web.
It's flaky, but looks promising!
Lots of complaints mentioned here. If you have a legitimate need for a product like Tasks that is more fully baked, I’d encourage you to check out lindy.ai (no affiliation). I’ve been using it to send periodic email updates on specific topics and it works flawlessly.
Whoops! Might have been built wrong? I'm seeing a source map error: Source map error: Error: request failed with status 404 Stack in the worker:networkRequest@resource://devtools/client/shared/source-map-loader/utils/network-request.js:43:9
Resource URL: https://cdn.oaistatic.com/assets/jbl0aowda306m4s1.js Source Map URL: jbl0aowda306m4s1.js.map
Also I am getting`Unable to display this message due to an error.`a lot.
So I opened "gpt4o with scheduled tasks" in the mobile app and there was no hint in the UI how to use it. I asked, "what's a scheduled task" and it answered with a generic response about scheduled tasks in general. Then I tried my luck and said, "remind me to pet my cat in 5 minutes," and it seemed to work. I then closed the mobile app, but no push notification came after 5 minutes, however I got an email, which I didn't expect (I expected push notifications). Clearly the feature needs more polish.
It seems there are some issues with the rollout.
Me:
> Give me positive feedback every hour
ChatGPT:
> Provide positive feedback
> Next run Jan 15, 2025
> Got it! I’ll send you positive feedback every hour.
An hour later, I received the following email:
```
Your scheduled task couldn't be completed
ChatGPT tried to complete Provide positive feedback multiple times, but it encountered an error and wasn't able to send. It will try again the next time this task is scheduled.
Open chat If you have any questions, please contact through the help center.
All the best, ChatGPT
```
This is interesting, although I am a little confused about the purpose of ChatGPT with this feature.
We already have many implementations where at a cron interval one could call the GPT APIs for stuff. And its nice to monitor it and see how things are working etc.
So I am curious whats the use case to embed a schedule inside the ChatGPT infrastructure. Seems like a little off its true purpose?
There is an editable tasks list and in the settings menu you can choose to receive notifications via push and/or email.
It's a tech demo to get normies used to the idea of agents. HackerNews "20 years in industry" guys are flabbergasted because it defaults to UTC so is therefore totally useless, clearly. Perhaps you live in a bubble?
This seems like such a strange product decision - why clutter the interface with such a niche use case? I’m trying to imagine OpenAI’s reasoning - a new angle on long term memory maybe? Or a potential interface for their agents?
Does the world need another reminder/todo app?
Many existing apps (like Todoist) have already had LLM integrations for a while now, and have more features like calendars and syncing.
Or do I completely not understand what this product is trying to be?
how does it handle timezones?
i saw no mention of them on the help article, or the ui
if i ask for a daily early morning news summary will it show up in the middle of the night or around lunch time? will it get updated when i travel? seems interesting if what you're looking for is a reminder that is not time relevant, just a thing that should happen at some point with a time precision of about 1 day.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10291617-scheduled-tasks...
The link doesn't work, presumably because I won't pay OpenAI which stole my API credits by making them have an "expiration date".
This is shaping up to be as bad as the Sora release.
For those unable to find this, you can find it as a new model in the model drop-down menu.
These are best understood as scheduled tasks for the AI instead of tasks for the user.
The biggest outcome here is that now the app has memory.
why are they trying to be a model provider as well as service provider
Couldn't you do the same with giving an LLM access to your shell and a cron command?
lol. I was a going to build this. Even purchased the domain alert.now I even have news based version active implementation at alarms.global if you install it to your phone as PWA you get push notifications when something important happens in your region or can notify you before public holidays
I even have an automated x account @alarmsglobal
Imagine being an engineer on the Siri team, must be so demoralizing.
A glorified reminder? Really?
Sorry, I simply cannot use OpenAI because it's leadership is kissing the ring of Trump.
This is going to eat software, and is the beginning of agents. The orchestrator of these tasks will come, and OpenAI will turn into a general purpose compute system, the endgame of workflow software. Soon there will be a database, and your prompts will be able to directly read and write to an openai hosted postgres instance. And your CRUD app will begin to disappear. Programming will feel pointless
This is the prompt describing the function call parameters:
When calling the automation, you need to provide three main parameters: 1. Title (title): A brief descriptive name for the automation. This helps identify it at a glance. For example, "Check for recent news headlines". 2. Prompt (prompt): The detailed instruction or request you want the automation to follow. For example: "Search for the top 10 headlines from multiple sources, ensuring they are published within the last 48 hours, and provide a summary of any recent Russian military strikes in the Lviv Oblast." 3. Schedule (schedule): This uses the iCalendar (iCal) VEVENT format to specify when the automation should run. For example, if you want it to run every day at 8:30 AM, you might provide:
BEGIN:VEVENT RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;BYHOUR=8;BYMINUTE=30;BYSECOND=0 END:VEVENT
Optionally, you can also include: • DTSTART (start time): If you have a specific starting point, you can include it. For example:
BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART:20250115T083000 RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;BYHOUR=8;BYMINUTE=30;BYSECOND=0 END:VEVENT
In summary, the call typically includes: • title (string): A short name. • prompt (string): What you want the automation to do. • schedule (string): The iCal VEVENT defining when it should run.