ChatGPT for Everyday Productivity

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This article is an excerpt from the book, Modern Generative AI with ChatGPT and OpenAI Models, by Valentina Alto. Master core data architecture design concepts and Azure Data & AI services to gain a cloud data and AI architect’s perspective to developing end-to-end solutions.

Introduction

In this article guide, we will cover the main activities ChatGPT can perform for general users daily to boost their productivity. The chapter will focus on concrete examples of writing assistance, decision-making, information retrieval, and so on, with suggestions and prompts so that you can implement them on your own.

By the end of this article, you will have learned how to use ChatGPT as a booster for the following activities: 

• Daily activities such as organizing agendas, meal-prepping, grocery shopping, and so on
• Generating brand-new text content
• Improving your writing skills and adapting the same content to different audiences
• Retrieving documentation and information for research and competitive intelligence

Technical requirements

For this article, you will require a ChatGPT account. You can create one for free.

ChatGPT as a daily assistant

ChatGPT can serve as a valuable daily assistant, helping you manage your tasks and streamline your workflow. It can optimize your daily routine by providing personalized assistance, thus saving you time and enhancing your efficiency.

Let’s start with a general suggestion on how I could make my day more productive:

Figure – An example of ChatGPT generating a productive routine

The preceding routine is pretty generic since it doesn’t focus on a specific list of activities (except studying). Let’s challenge ChatGPT to create a more task-oriented routine, including a list of activities we have to carry on during the day:

Figure – Optimized routine generated by ChatGPT on top of my activities

As you can see, here, ChatGPT acted as a to-do list maker, managing time for me and helping me in organizing my busy day.

Now, let’s look at some more examples of using ChatGPT for more specific tasks, including text generation, writing assistance, and information retrieval.

Generating text

As a language model, ChatGPT is particularly suited for generating text based on users’ instructions. For example, you could ask ChatGPT to generate emails, drafts, or templates that target a specific audience:

Figure – Example of an email generated by ChatGPT

Another example might be asking ChatGPT to create a pitch structure for a presentation you have to prepare:

Figure – Slideshow agenda and structure generated by ChatGPT

Improving writing skills and translation

Sometimes, rather than generating new content, you might want to revisit an existing piece of text. It this be for style improvement purposes, audience changes, language translation, and so on.

Let’s look at some examples. Imagine that I drafted an email to invite a customer of mine to a webinar. I wrote two short sentences. Here, I want ChatGPT to improve the form and style of this email since the target audience will be executive-level:

Figure – Example of an email revisited by ChatGPT to target an executive audience

Now, let’s ask the same thing but with a different target audience:

Figure – Example of the same email with a different audience, generated by ChatGPT

ChatGPT can also give you some feedback about your writing style and structure.

Imagine, for example, that you wrote a script with scenography for your YouTube channel. You included the speech as well as images, clips, and video editing activities. You also know that your typical audience is between 15 and 25 years old. You want feedback on your script and ask for this from ChatGPT:

                                                                          Figure – Example of ChatGPT providing feedback on a video script

As you can see, not only was ChatGPT able to give me feedback about the writing style, but also it suggested how I could improve the scenography of the whole video, by including more visuals.

I was impressed by this last one. ChatGPT was smart enough to see that there was no specific mention of the history of NLP in my introduction. Nevertheless, it sets up the expectation about that topic to be treated later on. This means that ChatGPT also has expertise in terms of how an essay should be structured and it was very precise in applying its judgment, knowing that it was just an introduction.

It is also impressive to note how the model can give different feedback, depending on the context. With the video script, ChatGPT’s feedback took into account that the final consumption of that content would have been on screen. On the other hand, the essay’s introduction lives in a more formal and academic context, with a specific structure, that ChatGPT was able to capture once more.

Last but not least, ChatGPT is also an excellent tool for translation. It knows at least 95 languages (if you have doubts about whether your language is supported, you can always ask ChatGPT directly). Here, however, there is a consideration that might arise: what is the added value of ChatGPT for translation when we already have cutting-edge tools such as Google Translate?

To answer this question, we have to consider some key differentiators and how we can leverage ChatGPT’s embedded translations capabilities:

• ChatGPT can capture the intent. This means that you could also bypass the translation phase since it is something that ChatGPT can do in the backend. For example, if you write a prompt to produce a social media post in French, you could write that prompt in any language you want – ChatGPT will automatically detect it (without the need to specify it in advance) and understand your intent:

Figure – Example of ChatGPT generating an output in a language that is different from the input

ChatGPT can capture the more refined meaning of particular slang or idioms. This allows for a translation that is not literal so that it can preserve the underlying meaning. Namely, let’s consider the British expression It’s not my cup of tea, to indicate something that is not the type of thing you like. Let’s ask both ChatGPT and Google Translate to translate it into Italian:

Figure – Comparison between ChatGPT and Google Translate while translating from English into Italian

As you can see, ChatGPT can provide several Italian idioms that are equivalent to the original one, also in their slang format. On the other hand, Google Translate performed a literal translation, leaving behind the real meaning of the idiom.

• As with any other task, you can always provide context to ChatGPT. So, if you want your translation to have a specific slang or style, you can always specify it in the prompt. Or, even funnier, you can ask ChatGPT to translate your prompt with a sarcastic touch:

       Figure – Example of ChatGPT translating a prompt with a sarcastic touch. The original content of the prompt was taken from OpenAI’s Wikipedia page

All these scenarios highlight one of the key killing features of ChatGPT and OpenAI models in general. Since they represent the manifestation of what OpenAI defined as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), they are not meant to be specialized (that is, constrained) on a single task. On the contrary, they are meant to serve multiple scenarios dynamically so that you can address a wide range of use cases with a single model.

In conclusion, ChatGPT is able not only to generate new text but also to manipulate existing material to tailor it to your needs. It has also proven to be very precise at translating between languages, also keeping the jargon and language-specific expressions intact.

In the next section, we will see how ChatGPT can assist us in retrieving information and competitive intelligence.

Quick information retrieval and competitive intelligence

Information retrieval and competitive intelligence are yet other fields where ChatGPT is a game-changer. The very first example of how ChatGPT can retrieve information is the most popular way it is used right now: as a search engine. Every time we ask ChatGPT something, it can retrieve information from its knowledge base and reframe it in an original way.

One example involves asking ChatGPT to provide a quick summary or review of a book we might be interested in reading:

Figure - Example of ChatGPT providing a summary and review of a book

Quick information retrieval and competitive intelligence Alternatively, we could ask for some suggestions for a new book we wish to read based on our preferences:

Figure – Example of ChatGPT recommending a list of books, given my preferences

Furthermore, if we design the prompt with more specific information, ChatGPT can serve as a tool for pointing us toward the right references for our research or studies.

Namely, you might want to quickly retrieve some background references about a topic you want to learn more about – for example, feedforward neural networks. Something you might ask ChatGPT is to point you to some websites or papers where this topic is widely treated:

Figure – Example of ChatGPT listing relevant references

As you can see, ChatGPT was able to provide me with relevant references to start studying the topic. However, it could go even further in terms of competitive intelligence.

Let’s consider I’m writing a book titled Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks – an Implementation with Python. I want to do some research about the potential competitors in the market. The first thing I want to investigate is whether there are already some competitive titles around, so I can ask ChatGPT to generate a list of existing books with the same content:

Figure – Example of ChatGPT providing a list of competitive books

You can also ask for feedback in terms of the saturation of the market you want to publish in:

Figure– ChatGPT advising about how to be competitive in the market

Finally, let’s ask ChatGPT to be more precise about what I should do to be competitive in the market where I will operate:

Figure – Example of how ChatGPT can suggest improvements regarding your book content to make it stand out

ChatGPT was pretty good at listing some good tips to make my book unique.

Overall, ChatGPT can be a valuable assistant for information retrieval and competitive intelligence. However, it is important to remember the knowledge base cut-off is 2021: this means that, whenever we need to retrieve real-time information, or while making a competitive market analysis for today, we might not be able to rely on ChatGPT.

Nevertheless, this tool still provides excellent suggestions and best practices that can be applied, regardless of the knowledge base cut-off.

Conclusion

All the examples we saw in this article were modest representations of what you can achieve with ChatGPT to boost your productivity. These small hacks can greatly assist you with activities that might be repetitive (answering emails with a similar template rather than writing a daily routine) or onerous (such as searching for background documentation or competitive intelligence).

Author Bio

Valentina Alto graduated in 2021 in data science. Since 2020, she has been working at Microsoft as an Azure solution specialist, and since 2022, she has been focusing on data and AI workloads within the manufacturing and pharmaceutical industry. She has been working closely with system integrators on customer projects to deploy cloud architecture with a focus on modern data platforms, data mesh frameworks, IoT and real-time analytics, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services (including Azure OpenAI Service), and Power BI for dashboarding. Since commencing her academic journey, she has been writing tech articles on statistics, machine learning, deep learning, and AI in various publications and has authored a book on the fundamentals of machine learning with Python.