When ChatGPT first announced that it had added a feature allowing you to create scheduled tasks, I was excited. I had plenty of ideas of ways that this could be really useful, from birthday or medication reminders to running bespoke searches each day. However, the reality was a little disappointing.
ChatGPT’s scheduled task feature is still in beta, despite being out for several months, and it has some significant limitations that are yet to be fixed. It could be so much better with a few changes.
Increase the Number of Tasks You Can Create
One of the biggest problems with scheduled tasks in their current form is that you can only have a maximum of 10 tasks. Once you’ve created your tenth, it’s not possible to create any more scheduled tasks without first deleting one of the current ones.
Combining tasks doesn’t always help, either. For example, if you have medication that you need to take twice a day and want to set up a reminder, you can create a single scheduled task that reminds you at two different times each day. However, even though this is saved as a single task, it seems to count as two of your total, probably because it has to run at two different times.
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Add Conditional Logic
This is where conditional logic would improve scheduled tasks enormously. I tried creating a unified birthday task with a list of birthdays and instructions to only generate a response if the date was one week before one of the birthdays on the list. However, this task would create a notification every day, saying something like “No birthdays today,” and I couldn’t find a way to stop it from happening.
The trouble with this is that when you get a notification every day saying nothing useful, you quickly start to ignore them and end up missing the ones that have useful information. This could be fixed by giving scheduled tasks the ability to use simple conditional logic. It would be so much better if you could use prompts such as “IF today’s date is one week before any date on this list THEN output a message stating that it’s that person’s birthday soon ELSE do nothing”.
Using conditional logic, you would then only receive a notification on specific days. ChatGPT models can generate and understand complex code, so it seems feasible that scheduled tasks could support simple conditional logic.
Create Tasks By Voice
Currently, the only way to create scheduled tasks is by typing out your instructions in one of the ChatGPT apps. This can get a little tedious, as the tasks often require a reasonable level of detail. It would make life much easier if you were able to create tasks using ChatGPT’s voice mode.
When you end a voice chat in ChatGPT, the conversation is saved, with everything you said transcribed into text. There’s no reason, then, why it shouldn’t be possible to take the transcribed text and turn it into a scheduled task. It would make ChatGPT feel much more like a genuine personal assistant and would make it far simpler to create scheduled tasks on the fly while you’re doing other things.
Allow Tasks to Send Critical Alerts
Some of your scheduled tasks may be more important than others. For example, a scheduled task that reminds you to take your medication is much more important than one that reminds you about somebody’s birthday. It would be very useful to have a way to make the priority tasks more prominent.
On my iPhone, I can receive critical alerts, which make a sound when they are delivered, even if my phone is on silent. It would be very useful to be able to choose whether scheduled task notifications are delivered normally or as a critical alert. I could then get audible notifications for important reminders, which would cut through the endless torrent of notifications I get on my phone.
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Make Tasks Editable in Any App
Currently, you can create scheduled tasks in any ChatGPT app and make changes to them by entering your amendments as a prompt. You can also pause a scheduled task within any app by tapping the pause icon in the original task confirmation.
However, in the majority of apps, there is no way to see the details of a scheduled task, such as its name, instructions, and schedule. The only way to see and edit these things directly is through the ChatGPT web app.
The ChatGPT web app is currently also the only place where you can delete scheduled tasks completely. This isn’t ideal, as with the limited number of scheduled tasks available, you often need to delete tasks in order to create new ones, and it’s not possible to delete them from the mobile or desktop apps.
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Allow File Uploads or Custom GPTs
I can upload an image of my garbage collection schedule into the GPT-4o model in ChatGPT, and it can identify the color of each date on the schedule, which corresponds to which type of garbage bins I need to put out. This would be ideal for a scheduled task, as it would mean it could run every garbage day and pull the information directly from the image to tell me the correct color to put out, even during the holidays when the schedule changes.
However, you can’t use uploaded files in scheduled tasks, making this impossible. It’s also not possible to use any custom GPTs in your scheduled tasks, so if you’ve created dedicated GPTs to perform specific tasks, you can’t run these on a schedule, either.
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Upgrade the Image Generation
This one is a bone of contention for me. One of my scheduled tasks is supposed to generate a funny single-panel cartoon each morning. Since I set it up, it’s been using DALL-E image generation, which struggles with generating text, and the results are usually unintentionally hilarious.
With the vastly improved image generation that’s been added to ChatGPT recently, I was looking forward to finally being able to read the text of my cartoons. I was also excited to see just how much better they would look with the new image generation.
However, while every ChatGPT model now uses the updated image generation, scheduled tasks still create images using DALL-E. It really shouldn’t be hard to allow scheduled tasks to use the far superior image generation.
Search for News Updates
This is the feature that I think would make scheduled tasks a game-changer. ChatGPT already knows a lot about me, such as my favorite music, the books I like to read, my favorite TV shows, and more. What I want is a way to get important news about my favorite stuff without asking for it.
For example, it would be useful if you could create a scheduled task that ran every day and searched for any important news about tour announcements or album releases for your favorite bands or artists or look for news about new seasons of your favorite TV shows or new books by your favorite authors. I’ve tried creating my own simplified versions of these tasks, but I always hit the same problems: ChatGPT will send a notification when the task runs, no matter what it finds, and will usually regurgitate the same information that it found every previous day.
It would be a killer feature if you could receive a notification only when your favorite band had announced a new tour with dates near your location, one of your favorite authors had a new book coming out, or the game you’ve been waiting to play finally had a release date.
ChatGPT has the capability to pull information from all of your previous chats, so it would be able to learn what you prefer and provide information about things that you’ve shown an interest in previously without you having to type out everything that you want it to look for.
The scheduled tasks feature in ChatGPT has a lot of promise, but it’s not living up to that promise. It feels like OpenAI has forgotten about the feature, with nothing changing in several months. With some simple upgrades such as conditional logic, file uploads, and smarter alerts, it would turn a promising feature into a truly excellent one.
