OpenAI is testing a new ChatGPT setting that connects directly to work email, chat and cloud storage accounts in order to imitate a person’s writing voice. Rather than asking someone to paste in a few sample paragraphs before generating a draft, the feature reaches into apps like Gmail and Slack on an ongoing basis, studying real messages and documents to learn recurring phrases, sentence structure and tone.
What the Feature Actually Does
The tool, called Writing Style, is part of ChatGPT Work, OpenAI’s product tier built for business and productivity use.
An onboarding screen shown to early testers describes the mechanism plainly: the assistant will write in a person’s voice by referencing examples pulled from their connected apps. Instead of a one-time upload of writing samples, the feature is designed to draw on an ongoing stream of real messages and documents, letting it pick up on details like preferred sign-offs, capitalization habits and how formally or casually someone tends to phrase requests.
That kind of granular pattern-matching is a step beyond what most writing-assistance tools have offered. Rather than applying a generic template for a “professional” or “casual” tone, the feature is designed to reflect the specific quirks of one person’s writing, down to habits as small as whether they favor short sentences, use particular transition phrases, or sign off emails the same way every time.
That distinguishes Writing Style from earlier ChatGPT personalization tools, which generally relied on a user manually describing a preferred tone or pasting in a handful of examples at the start of a session. By connecting directly to live accounts, the feature can theoretically keep adapting as new emails and messages accumulate, without requiring anyone to re-teach it each time.
Which Apps Get Connected
OpenAI has organized the connected services into categories inside the feature’s settings. Slack is listed under messaging, Google Drive and Notion fall under documents, and Gmail covers email; Microsoft SharePoint has also appeared as a connected option in early builds. The setup is managed through ChatGPT’s Settings menu, under a Personalization section that now includes a dedicated Writing Style option, where users choose which of the available services to link.
Because those apps span personal email, internal team chat and shared company documents, the range of material the feature can draw from is broader than a typical writing-sample upload. A single connected Gmail account alone can span years of correspondence with different tones depending on the recipient, and Slack messages tend to be far more casual than formal email, meaning the feature has to reconcile very different registers of the same person’s writing.
Who Can Use It Right Now
Access is currently limited to a small group of users as part of an early test, and OpenAI has confirmed the feature exists without committing to a timeline for a broader release. That puts Writing Style in the same early-access category as several other ChatGPT Work features the company has rolled out gradually, testing functionality with a limited set of accounts before deciding whether and how to expand it. For most ChatGPT users, the feature is not yet visible or available to enable.
Because the rollout is tied to ChatGPT Work rather than the consumer version of the product, early access appears concentrated among business accounts and teams already paying for OpenAI’s workplace-focused tier. That distribution suggests OpenAI is treating Writing Style primarily as a productivity feature aimed at employees drafting routine business communication, rather than a consumer-facing tool for personal writing, at least during this initial testing phase.
Why Standing Access Changes the Privacy Calculus
The feature’s design raises a different kind of privacy question than earlier ChatGPT tools. Granting an AI assistant a one-time writing sample is a bounded exchange: the model sees what was pasted in and nothing more. Connecting Gmail, Slack, Google Drive and SharePoint is a standing arrangement, giving the assistant ongoing access to a person’s actual email inbox and work chat history rather than a curated excerpt. That distinction matters for anyone weighing whether to enable the feature, since the material available to the assistant would include whatever sits in those accounts, not just messages someone deliberately chose to share.
OpenAI has not detailed how long connected data is retained, how it is used beyond generating writing-style suggestions, or what separates this data flow from the company’s other enterprise data-handling policies. Those specifics typically surface as a feature moves from a small internal test toward a wider release, and Writing Style has not yet reached that stage.
How It Fits Into a Broader AI Personalization Push
Writing Style arrives as AI companies more broadly compete to make assistants feel less generic and more tailored to an individual user. Tools that mimic a specific person’s tone are useful for drafting emails or messages that do not read as obviously AI-generated, a capability increasingly in demand from professionals who want help with routine writing without losing their own voice in the output. OpenAI’s decision to build that personalization through deep app connections, rather than through manually supplied examples, signals a broader direction for how the company plans to make ChatGPT feel more attuned to individual users, provided the access tradeoff proves acceptable to the businesses and employees who would need to grant it.
The approach also reflects a wider trend of AI assistants asking for standing access to a person’s existing digital footprint rather than requesting information piecemeal. As more workplace tools connect directly to email, chat and file storage, the amount of ongoing access any single assistant holds tends to grow quietly over time, a pattern Writing Style extends into the specific area of matching someone’s writing voice rather than summarizing documents or scheduling meetings, which have been the more common uses for these kinds of app connections so far.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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