5 Very Useful GPTs to Save You Time
Diagrams, Chat with PDFs, Text-to-Video, and Image Generation!
Hey y’all!
We’ve only got a few more days of January (where did it all go?!) and I’ve been grateful for the time to capture my thoughts and share my work with you! If any of this content has been helpful, would you please share it with others? Thank you!
Stay warm — or cool — wherever you are! And whatever you’re doing, remember that all things start small in the beginning but if you love what you do then you’ll always get something out of it (and measurable growth is just a possible byproduct of that investment). Personal development never goes out of style.
✌(-‿-)✌
— Summer
The GPT (app?) Store is getting bigger every single day and “discoverability” is going to be a crucial part of its success. That is to say that it’s already a bit hard to find the right tool for the job, especially if you’re trying to save time. The irony is thick here.
But, since this newsletter is all about being “practical” here are some practical GPTs that I’ve used in the past month that have produced results that I’m pretty happy about. If you’ve got some that you’ve used please share them in the comments!
Zapier presently connects with over 5,000+ apps to automate repetitive tasks without coding, allowing users to create automated workflows. Although I’m presently keeping things trim with my present workflow(s) I’ve been lightly toying with automating a few of my more simple activities like auto-tweeting each newsletter post to Twitter.
These small opportunities to save time start to add up.
Diagrams: Show Me tells you precisely what it’s about as it can create useful visualizations for architecture, flowcharts, mind maps, and more. It isn’t perfect but you can even choose what rendering tool you want (in the above case it used Mermaid.js). Not too shabby if you ask me.
Although I already shared a standalone “Chat with PDF” tool — which works well — there are, of course, GPTs that can do this so you don’t have to move out of their interface. ChatWithPDF is one such tool. You can see there are a ton of them out there already:
I do prefer simple tools and I’m not necessarily interested in storing them with OpenAI but you can choose the one you need and have it do the work for you.
This is by far the most popular text-to-video GPT, at least presently (January, 2024). I’ve been toying with the idea of making some of these newsletter posts into useful YouTube videos and wanted to see what a simple introduction might look like!
You can add a title and then and then slides (or at least that’s what I called them) to create something unique and useful:
Give it a whirl! Of course they’d like you to create an account (and pay to get rid of the watermarks) but that’s a small price to pay to get a nice experimental output.
I’ll add that there’s another text-to-video for social platforms that has a massive editor where you can perform some pretty advanced functions too: Veed GPT. Check a look at this web-based tool:
Here’s what I asked it to do:
And here’s the output:
Not bad, right?
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add Canva, an exceedingly useful image generation tool that I actually use for today’s post! You can see my chat with the GPT itself below and also the outputs:
I didn’t like the first iteration so I gave it a bit more context and then went to Canva’s website to edit it a bit:
Here’s the final form:
I clearly changed the text but I didn’t mind the basic frame. Now, I’m not sure how much time this saved me since I’m pretty particular but I bet with better prompting I could get very close to the final output that I want without having to edit it manually.
I hope that’s useful!
\( ﾟヮﾟ)/
— Summer