• What's brewing in AI
  • Posts
  • 🧙🏼‍♂️ New plugins, ChatGPT gets a memory 🧠, alternative plugins for web search 🔎

🧙🏼‍♂️ New plugins, ChatGPT gets a memory 🧠, alternative plugins for web search 🔎

whatplugin weekly #3

Author

Dario Chincha
July 21, 2023

Hi there,

A warm welcome to the 93 new subscribers who joined last week, and this third edition of whatplugin weekly – bringing you new plugins and ChatGPT sorcery straight to your inbox.

This issue is brought to you by Clay:

👥 Clay brings you AI powered tools for cultivating amazing personal and professional relationships. The Clay plugin for ChatGPT allows you to search across your network and contacts — including Linkedin, Facebook, email, and iMessage — when you ask questions. Try Clay now.

There are now 750 ChatGPT plugins in the plugin store. Let’s dig right into a few of the 31 new ChatGPT plugins released in the past week.

🔥 Top ChatGPT plugins launched in the past seven days

A feature of several of the latest plugins is that they are rapidly expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities to export the chat output into different formats. These can easily be combined in your workflow with other plugins.

  1. Doc Maker - Easily converts text into various file formats such as DOCX, XLSX, PDF, CSV, TXT, HTML, XML, JSON.

  2. Telegraph Export - Exports your text to Telegraph swiftly and conveniently.

  3. CSV Creator - Transforms any text into a well-structured CSV file.

  4. PDF Creator - Converts any text into a PDF file.

Here are the categories with most new launches:

📊 Data & Research - 76 plugins (5 new)

🛍️ Online Shopping & Deals - 67 plugins (4 new)

🧠 ChatGPT gets a memory with OpenAI’s latest feature: Custom Instructions

Another exciting new Beta feature was launched this week by OpenAI. Custom Instructions gives you the ability to share things with ChatGPT that it will consider in its response. The instructions are added to all your conversations going forward (you can change or delete them at any time).

I’ve taken the new feature for a test run and must say it’s amazing. There have been some previous plugins aiming to do the same such as Memory Bank, but this native feature is easier to use and much faster. Plus, I’m less concerned about where my data is going (although still somewhat concerned!).

Here’s an example of how you can use Custom Descriptions for ChatGPT:

Step 1: Enable the feature

To activate Custom Instructions, go to your settings inside ChatGPT, navigate to Beta Features, and switch the toggle to “on”. It also works in the iOS app!

Step 2: Give it relevant information about you

Here’s an example of background info you can give ChatGPT about yourself to improve the output it gives. Notice the bullet point about me having barista training ☕️ (purely fictional)

Step 3: Tell it what kind of output you would like

Tell it what it should take into account in the output, such as a signature for emails. There are many possibilities with this. For coding tasks, you could ask for the output in a code block, for example.

Step 4: Write a prompt and let ChatGPT use the information to tailor the output to your needs

Awesome! Barista skills mentioned ☕️, formal tone and e-mail signature used. The new feature is also fast, and works seemingly without any delay compared to the plain GPT-4 model without custom instructions enabled.

What are you waiting for? Go customise your ChatGPT experience already ✨

🔗 Plugin combo of the week

Custom Instructions is going to be a highly useful feature in combination with plugins, as it can give the plugin both background information as well as instructions on how to format the output, in order to make responses personalised and more helpful.

Try this: Use Custom Instructions + Clay to format highly personalised, professional e-mails to people in your network.

📰 Bing search, Webpilot and Web Requests plugins are down! What are the alternatives?

After OpenAI disabled the Browse with Bing feature on ChatGPT earlier this month, the alternative plugins Web Pilot and Web Requests have also been experiencing some issues/downtime.

Here’s a working option if you need to do Google searches: Browserpilot. In my experience it’s a bit slower than the other alternatives, but hey, at least it works!

If your purpose is to read the content of specific links, you can find several decent options for this under the Web Content Access category.

OpenAI originally disabled the Bing feature temporarily on July 3rd, citing issues with inappropriate content display and respect for content owners' rights, and it hasn’t been back since.

That’s all for this week! Look out for new, useful plugins in your inbox next week.

Until next time,

Dario Chincha

Plugin Exploration Wizard 🧙🏼‍♂️

Follow me on Twitter for more ChatGPT and plugin hacks.

Did you get this report from a friend? You can sign up here to get the next one.

Interested in featuring your plugin on our website or sponsoring this newsletter? Just hit reply to this email and we can discuss the details.