What are Custom GPTs?
Jan 30, 2024
I love using OpenAI’s Custom GPTs to solve little problems I have and make life a bit easier. In a matter of minutes, you can do the same, usually with no coding required.
What are Custom GPTs?
Custom GPTs are essentially customized ChatGPT interfaces that work exactly like ChatGPT but have special context added that helps it achieve the purpose of the GPT.
This feature was rolled out by OpenAI back in November of 2023, and it’s a feature in ChatGPT which is essentially a way to do prompt injection for each chat message you send to the GPT. That’s a fancy way of saying that it will start your chat session as if you had pasted in some text before you write your actual prompt to ChatGPT.
It can do more than just that. You can have your custom GPT call APIs, reference knowledge that you’ve uploaded, and perform calculations. It will even suggest a name for the GPT and create a logo for it.
You can create your own custom GPTs by going here.
What can I do with Custom GPTs?
I honestly don’t think that OpenAI does a good enough job of explaining the use cases for this feature, so I’ll give some concrete examples of problems I’ve solved using this.
Creating classified listings from an image
Problem: I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to sell on Kleinanzeigen (the German Craigslist), but writing out descriptions of the items can be really tedious. Especially if I want to write them in German.
Solution: Listmeister, a custom GPT that you can upload a photo of your item to. It will identify the item and ask you any questions that it thinks that it needs answered in order to write the best listing possible. Then, it outputs the description of the item in German, along with a catchy title.
Result: I can easily list items on Kleinanzeigen at insane speed. Getting a dozen or so listings up takes less than 20 minutes now.
Digitizing recipes from an image
Problem: I use an app called Paprika 3 to manage recipes. Though this app does a great job of taking recipes from online sources and processing them for use in the app, I find that the best recipes are contained in the cookbooks I have. Entering the recipe details into the app manually is really tedious.
Solution: PaprikaGPT. This custom GPT takes an image of a recipe and extracts all the recipe data, compiles it into a JSON format that can be read by the app, and then calls an API to zip and prepare the file for consumption by the app.
Result: I can quickly and accurately get a recipe from a cookbook into the app so I don’t get the cookbook dirty and can instantly add the items to the app’s shopping list automatically.
I was able to make Listmeister without any coding, and from when I had the idea to when I was able to use it took about 15 minutes. I just followed the wizard in the “create” section of the editor and told it what I wanted it to do.
PaprikaGPT was a bit more involved, since I had to make an API to process the JSON into a proprietary format. But it was still pretty quick to make, and definitely will save me a lot of time as I’m digitizing recipes.
These are just some examples of how you can take your ChatGPT experience to the next level.