How to Change Spotlight Search to Ask ChatGPT on MacOS 27

The all new Siri AI and Spotlight search experience in MacOS 27 is significantly more powerful and capable than prior versions of Siri and Spotlight, but Spotlight Search has a neat trick up its sleeve where you can change it to ask ChatGPT instead, directly from Spotlight search on the Mac. And you don’t even need a ChatGPT account to use this feature, though you can connect it to your OpenAI credentials if you’d like to keep the interactions in your ChatGPT history.

Here’s how to use this super handy quick ChatGPT access on Mac, and yes you will need MacOS 27 or later.

First, Enable the Siri ChatGPT Extension on Mac

You will need to enable the ChatGPT Siri Extension to use this Ask ChatGPT feature in Spotlight, if you have not done so already. You can do that by:

1. Go to the  Apple menu and choose “System Settings”
2. Go to “Siri” then to “Extensions”
3. Find the ChatGPT Extension and toggle it ON

If you wish to use your existing OpenAI / ChatGPT login, you can do so, but that is optional and can be done in this same settings panel. The main advantage to using a ChatGPT account here is that these queries will then go into your ChatGPT history.

Yes, you can still use ChatGPT in MacOS without having an OpenAI/ChatGPT account. Let’s learn how to do that next.

How to Change Spotlight to Ask ChatGPT on Mac

Now that the ChatGPT extension is enabled (it might be already enabled on your Mac by default), here’s how you can change Spotlight search to ask ChatGPT instead of Siri / Spotlight:

1. Bring up Spotlight as usual by pressing Command+Spacebar or F4 key, or your shortcut



2. Right-click in the search box, then go to “Ask” and choose “ChatGPT”



3. Now type your query or question as usual, where it’ll be passed to ChatGPT:



4. ChatGPT will respond with your answer, instead of Siri or Spotlight:

In the example shown in the screenshots, Spotlight was used to ask ChatGPT to write a simple Python script to perform a function, to which it immediately did, all right in the Spotlight interface!

Again, you do not even need to have an OpenAI or ChatGPT login to use this ChatGPT feature in Spotlight, you just need to enable the extension on your Mac (some users find this is enabled by default, others do not). If you do wish to connect ChatGPT to your login, you can do that in the Siri > Extensions settings.

If you have long had the ChatGPT app for Mac you might already be familiar with the Option+Spacebar shortcut to access ChatGPT directly that way, but having ChatGPT built into Spotlight like this is a really useful feature that uses the same Spotlight shortcut you’re already used to. Plus, you can have and use ChatGPT on the Mac without ever downloading the ChatGPT app this way.

Try out this feature, it’s really quite useful, and a really nice addition to Spotlight, Siri AI, and the latest versions of MacOS.