ChatGPT plugins can boost your productivity with artificial intelligence

OpenAI's ChatGPT has revolutionized the way people work in a matter of months, and the advent of plugins for GPT-4 has further expanded its capabilities, providing users with even more versatile and powerful productivity tools.

Sorting through the hundreds of add-ons for GPT-4 may seem like a daunting task, but Decrypt has prepared a list of seven performance-enhancing plug-ins you should try today.

What is the ChatGPT plugin?

A ChatGPT plugin is a software add-on created by developers that integrates other applications into the ChatGPT chatbot with artificial intelligence and allows you to implement features beyond those originally built into ChatGPT. These plugins manage the interaction between the application and the ChatGPT API.

Here is a list of powerful plugins designed to make searching the web, reading documents and computing easier.

1. ScholarAI

With ScholarAI, you can retrieve summaries, full text, or citations from scholarly literature by simply providing the URL of a PDF file published on the Internet. ScholarAI also provides links to books or other sources where relevant information can be found. A useful addition to the plugin is that it returns the user to the original URL of the PDF file if it does not know the answer to a given question, rather than having to come up with an answer using artificial intelligence hallucinations.

2. Reference reader

Link Reader is a ChatGPT plugin that allows you to process web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, etc. After entering a URL, the plugin will generate a brief description of the content, after which it can be asked specific questions related to it. Link Reader also works with Google Docs URLs, but you have to make sure that the document is available to "anyone with a link". The plugin also provides the ability to search the open web for answers.

3. Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha was one of the first companies to create a plug-in for ChatGPT, bringing its natural language computing skills to GPT-4. As with the web version, if you ask Wolfram Alpha a math problem, you will get an answer. Wolfram Alpha will try to provide as much information as possible, including a breakdown of the results and any charts or graphs that support its answers.

4. Social search

This plugin allows you to search for an account's recent tweets, images, and media files on social networks. For example, searching for a specific Twitter account will display the last five tweets (if available) and information about what activity the tweet has received.

5. DeFiLlama

With thousands of blockchain projects, sorting through the data can be a daunting task. DeFiLlama, creator of a popular analytics site, offers one of a growing list of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related GPT-4 plugins that can collect real-time data across multiple blockchains. Some of the data that DeFiLllama says its plugin can capture includes information on protocols, total blockchain value, top players growing and losing.

Using plug-ins

When installing plugins, it is a good idea to first ask ChatGPT and the plugin how to use it. In most cases, ChatGPT will explain how the plugin works and what commands to use.

When using any plug-in, you should double-check the information provided before attempting to use it in any way. AI hallucination remains a significant problem in the development of artificial intelligence, which OpenAI says it is actively trying to solve.

This list is just the beginning. From students using a chatbot to help with homework and exams to HR professionals using it to write termination letters, the possibilities for using the more than 400 plugins in the ChatGPT store to increase productivity are endless.