OpenAI recently launched an incredibly powerful new feature for ChatGPT Plus subscribers - plugins. These enable third parties to develop tools which harness GPT-4’s raw power, combined with a sprinkle of something extra. Sadly, many of the early plugins simply replicate the abilities of existing websites, with the chatbot adding nothing to the experience, so to help guide you through this minefield, we’ve compiled a list of the best new plugins to enhance your chatbot’s chat! We’ll begin with the big one…
‍

BROWSE WITH BING

Browse With Bing is so important to ChatGPT’s future that it doesn’t live with the other plugins, it gets its own separate menu button. This means that at the time of writing, you’ll have to choose between Binging it or using any of the ordinary plugins, but it is certainly a plugin, and an incredibly powerful one at that: it jailbreaks ChatGPT out of the time prison that trapped it in September, 2021, and allows it to roam free in the present day. 

It should be noted that ChatGPT’s subscriber features are a little like a genie in a bottle; your questions are limited (25 every 3 hours), so you shouldn’t waste them. This matters because ChatGPT will often choose not to use Bing if you don’t explicitly ask it to, so make sure you’re explicit in your prompts about how you want ChatGPT to tackle your question!

‍

ASK YOUR PDF

Our first proper plugin sounds dull at first: it simply takes links to PDFs on the internet and allows you to ask questions about them. The potential, however, is enormous; who hasn’t been confronted by a weighty PDF file and groaned when they see the page count?

We tested AskYourPDF on several weighty academic papers about artificial intelligence. It performed superbly, summarizing complex ideas in comprehensible layman’s language. There are other ChatGPT plugins that claim to offer similar services that simply do not work; one insisted that the infamous academic work “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” was actually about parrots, and hallucinated an entire PDF on the subject to support that theory! 

‍

‍

One other vital use for this service is interrogating PDFs from unknown sources; PDFs are a popular means of distributing malware, and a service like AskYourPDF can allow you to access the contents of a dubious file without exposing yourself to risk. 

‍

SHOW ME

ChatGPT is a text-based medium; it can create a data table or even limited ASCII art, but if you want diagrams you’re going to need Show Me, which will create flowcharts on request and display them to you in the ChatGPT interface. What’s more, you can click through on the image to go to the Show Me website, where there are editing tools that allow you to make alterations, which will subsequently show up on the ChatGPT page. Simple, effective, and very useful.

‍

‍

KAYAK

Booking travel online has been an obsession of web developers from the earliest days of the internet, and one of the pioneers of that market was also one of the first companies to launch a ChatGPT plugin. We’re not going to talk about it, though, because it’s not very good. Instead, use Kayak, which is excellent, and guides you through complicated booking processes in a considered and practical manner, making sure it has all the info it requires from you about your needs before it starts trying to sell you flights. 

‍

PLAYLISTAI

There are a few music discovery plugins out there, but in testing we’ve found PlaylistAI to be the best at handling our aggressively difficult requests. We tested various plugins on their ability to build a playlist around the songs featured in Brainfreeze, the classic funk DJ mix; PlaylistAI was the only one that understood the brief. Where it bumped into songs which aren’t available on Spotify, it tried to add others by the same artists, or ones with a similar sound. Very impressive! 

‍

VIDEO INSIGHTS

Video Insights performs a similar role to AskYourPDF, but for YouTube. An extremely powerful application which not only provides summaries of YouTube videos, but can also be used to interrogate them in remarkable ways. Examples include asking the plugin to provide recommendations for further reading (it will cite books, blogs, academic papers and even recommend online courses), or construct multiple choice quizzes to test the user’s knowledge of the subject matter. Essential.

‍

‍

CHESS

ChatGPT famously cheats at chess, but this plugin will allow you to play a legal game where the chatbot doesn’t hallucinate fresh pieces out of thin air and then check you with them. Given the many excellent options for playing online chess that already exist, you’d be forgiven for asking why anyone would need this, but this plugin has one great benefit for players looking to improve. While the app posts images of the board as you play, you can not interact with them directly, and must enter your moves in the text field using standard notation. This can really help reinforce board awareness and visualization skills, which are both vital and tricky to train! 

The plugin will not reveal what engine it uses to power its moves, but claims at its strongest setting to have an Elo of 2850, almost identical to that of the world’s top-rated human player, Magnus Carlsen. Fortunately, you can also configure it to play at lower strengths!