In October, OpenAI outlined plans for turning ChatGPT into a platform for apps. So far, the AI chatbot has answered your queries, done research on your behalf, made images, and even done a bit of autonomous work in the web browser. Now, it’s turning into a hub of apps that you push on a daily basis.
A few days ago, the ChatGPT app store finally went live, and the company has already invited developers to submit their apps. The whole idea behind the initiative is that instead of opening apps on your phone, you can simply turn to ChatGPT and instruct it to get the work done.
“Show me 1BHK house listings under $800K around the Ridgewood area on Zillow.” “Create a poster for an organic Kimchi business that focuses on handmade recipes in Canva.” You get the idea, right? The objective here is to skip multi-step chores in apps and simply instruct ChatGPT to handle them.
Of course, you will have to link your apps (or the user account) with ChatGPT, so there’s that conundrum you must address first. For now, there are roughly sixty apps available in the app store, and after playing around with them, here are my favorites.
Apple Music
This is my go-to music streaming app, and it also happens to be the most disorganized one. I am astoundingly lazy at music discovery, as well, and unless the algorithm recommends something truly impressive, I can play the same two songs on loop for hours.
With Apple Music in ChatGPT, it has become a tad easier for me to discover some fresh music, or even create playlists built atop a specific song. For example, I simply typed “Find me songs similar to Mabalash by Hamaki and create a playlist called ‘soul’ in Apple Music.”
Soon after I hit enter, the AI chatbot took about a minute and created a new playlist with eight songs. It didn’t create a poster for the playlist, but the tracks it picked up were mostly on point.
Canva
I create a few dozen images in Canva on a daily basis. Between my own work as a journalist and assisting my sister in her role as a budding fashion designer, I have to edit and touch up special media assets and website visuals in Canva, thanks to a shared subscription.
I love manual controls, but on a healthy few occasions, all I need is a decent cropping to fit the image in a specific aspect ratio. For such low-stakes tasks, I simply upload the image and narrate the requirements to ChatGPT as a voice command. I don’t even have to open Canva and can download the edited iages straight from the chat window.
For brainstorming, I often pick up images from Pinterest and ask ChatGPT to create a few concept sketches with the specific tweaks and modifications. It’s speedy and pretty useful when you’re on the move, or running short of time, or just want to get some work done right on your phone.
Booking
Booking is nothing short of a lifeline for me. I’ve been living out of a suitcase for nearly half a decade, working from different cities around the year. My go-to platform for finding stay options. The adventure is quite fulfilling, but the hassle of finding a suitable stay option simply sucks the soul out of my heart.
It’s boring, repetitive, and time-consuming. This is where ChatGPT comes to the rescue. I simply gave it the required details, and it got the job done in roughly a minute. This was my query:
“Find me long-term stay options in Dharamkot for one person between December 14 and January 14th. Prefer places with a kitchen facility, and prioritizes homestays or guest houses.”
And what you see in the image above is the result. In addition to the top picks presented as an image carousel, ChatGPT also listed five other options that I could explore based on my requirements. It saved me the whole ordeal of setting up filters, filling in details, and narrowed down the search to “just the right” options.
Coursera
Aside from my day job as a journalist, I also volunteer as a teacher and trainer from time to time. My most recent gig involved teaching English and Mathematics to kids in an orphanage run by a British nun in a hilly area. The role is rewarding, but finding the right course material isn’t always easy.
It’s not due to the lack of learning material, but the sheer abundance of it, that makes it harder to find the highest quality material. Thanks to the Coursera connection within ChatGPT, I was able to reduce my research time and find appropriate courses with a prompt as straightforward as follows:
“Find me free courses that focus on science education for high school students. prefer options from top universities and those that offer a certificate to learners.” In roughly a couple of minutes, ChatGPT pulled up course material from esteemed institutions such as Duke University, the University of Virginia, and MIT, tagging alongside a brief description of the subject material.
Adobe Photoshop
Image generation and editing have emerged as a breakout use-case scenario of generative AI tools. And for obvious reasons. We click a lot of pictures, some for memory, and the rest for posting on social media. For the latter, achieving that refined “Instagram” look is deemed pretty important.
Usually, people either stick with the built-in editor or switch to dedicated editing tools such as Photoshop and Snapseed. It’s a time-consuming process, and you don’t always get the perfect results, especially if you don’t know the nitty-gritty of image editing.
This is where conversational editing comes to the rescue. “Slightly strengthen the bokeh image in this image. Enhance the contrast on the jacket. and fit it to a vertical 1920 x 1080 aspect ratio.” This was my prompt, and ChatGPT delivered a Photoshop-edited result within two minutes.
I am pretty sure that if I went ahead with manual editing, the process would’ve taken me at least ten minutes of hit-and-miss adjustments. With Photoshop integration within ChatGPT, I got the desired modifications without any frustrating back-and-forth manual edits.
Overall, the experience of using apps in ChatGPT is extremely rewarding. The only caveat is whether you trust ChatGPT with access to your activity in other apps, especially those that have access to personal data, such as Gmail or a Google Drive folder. I’d suggest sticking with tasks where you expose the least amount of personal data, or push apps in ChatGPT where it can save you a significant amount of time and effort.