Elevate Your Tech Game with These 9 Must-Try ChatGPT Plugins Today

Following the release of GPT-4, OpenAI launched ChatGPT plugins, a new way to extend the abilities of the AI chatbot. Available exclusively to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, around 85 plugins were available at launch. But that number has since grown to hundreds of options. Unfortunately, a huge number of these plugins do not really do anything remarkable.

On March 19, 2024,OpenAI disabled ChatGPT Plugin conversations and finally completely removed them on April 9, 2024. ChatGPT Plugins were removed because much of their functionality can be found incustom GPTs and the GPT Store .

1. Prompt Perfect

The responses you get from the ChatGPT are only as good as the prompts you provide. But prompting can be tricky–it’s a game of hits and misses. Prompt Perfect is a ChatGPT plugin that helps youcraft well-structured and effective prompts that will get you the results you want .

To invoke the Prompt Perfect plugin, you’ll need to start your prompt with “Perfect,” followed by the prompt you have in mind. The plugin will then replace your prompt with an optimized version, typically more detailed, ensuring youget the best responses from ChatGPT .

In the example below, we asked ChatGPT to “write a funny story about the history of car seatbelts.” The plugin immediately kicks in and replaces the prompt with a more descriptive prompt that produces a better response.

2. Link Reader

Another useful ChatGPT plugin is the aptly named Link Reader plugin. Although its primary function is reading the content of the links you provide, when paired with other ChatGPT plugins, there’s a lot you can do with it. From summarizing the content of web pages to fact-checking news, the possibilities are endless.

In the example below, we paired the Link Reader plugin with ChatGPT’s inbuilt browsing feature to fact-check a news article.

3. InstaCart

The InstaCart ChatGPT plugin helps you express your meal planning needs in natural language and, in turn, get a “shoppable” list of the food items or ingredients that you need to prepare the meal in an instant. The plugin generates an InstaCart shopping list of all the ingredients you’ll need to prepare a meal in its right quantity. With a few further clicks, you can get all the ingredients delivered to your doorstep.

It is quite powerful, flexible, and easy to use. Once you mention plans to cook or prepare a meal in your prompt, the plugin will likely kick in. If it doesn’t, you can explicitly ask ChatGPT to use it.

In the illustration below, we prompted ChatGPT with some ingredients we had. Then, we asked it what meal we could cook with them. After suggesting we cook Jollof rice, ChatGPT listed the additional ingredients we’ll need and asked whether to generate an InstaCart shopping list.

When we replied “yes,” InstaCart generated a link to a shopping list of the remaining ingredient we’ll need to cook Jollof rice.

After we made a few adjustments, all the necessary ingredients were added to our shopping cart awaiting checkout.

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4. Wolfram

Although a lot of the ChatGPT plugins offer minimal improvements toChatGPT’s capabilities , Wolfram is a standout option. The Wolfram plugin substantially augments ChatGPT’s abilities. It makes ChatGPT significantly smarter by giving it access to real-time data, improved mathematical abilities, and a large dataset of carefully curated, and largely verified data.

While ChatGPT has hadAI hallucination , inaccurate responses, and slip-ups in mathematical calculations, Wolfram helps ChatGPT overcome some of those problems. So, when using ChatGPT to produce content that involves calculations or needs to be as factual as possible, Wolfram comes in quite handy. One of our favorite, although unconventional use cases for Wolfram are for fact-checking ChatGPT-generated information because of its superior fact-based dataset.

In this illustration, we asked ChatGPT to generate data about the planet Pluto. (This contains both factual and incorrect information)

We then invoked the Wolfram plugin to fact-check the information using its fact-based knowledge base. And here’s the result.

Wolfram was able to run the generated information against its database to check for accuracy.

5. ChatWithPDF

The ChatWithPDF plugin does exactly what the name suggests. With this handy tool, you can effortlesslyuse ChatGPT to extract information from any PDF file by simply providing a link to it. No additional steps are required—just share the PDF link in your prompt and begin asking your questions.

There are dozens of possible use cases. You can upload your class lessons as a PDF and use it to prepare for exams, upload work documents and use it to prepare reports for work, or simply prompt the tool to extract the key points from any PDF. Here’s a sample prompt for invoking the plugin:

Does GPT-4 have visual input abilities? Use the PDF at the URL “https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf “ as your knowledge base.

We provided a link to OpenAI’s GPT-4 technical report and asked it about the model’s visual input abilities. Here’s what it had to say:

Turns out another important use case is making sense of technical documents like this.

6. Video Insights

The Video Insights plugin is a video interfacing tool that lets you extract information from videos hosted on platforms like YouTube and Daily Motion. You can use the tool to create summaries of a video, ask specific questions on topics covered in the video, get a complete transcript of the video, or extract metadata like the number of likes, views, or comments on a video. Be careful with trusting the metadata it extracts; it was wrong eight out of 15 times when we tried it. But the summaries it produces are quite spot on. To use the tool, use a prompt like:

What’s the YouTube video at this URL (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI ) about?

We tried the tool on a first-impression video ofApple’s Vision Pro VR headset on YouTube, and here’s what it had to say:

Yes, it was a spot-on description of the video if you’re wondering.

7. SceneXplain

SceneXplain is a hidden gem we found tucked away in the ChatGPT plugin store. What does it do? It takes an image URL as input and returns a detailed description of the image. It is quite impressive in describing complex scenes with multiple people and objects. When we tried it, its descriptions of 12 of the 14 images we tried were spot on, although it can be a bit overly artistic or dramatic in its choice of words. On its own, SceneXplain might not have a lot of use cases. But when combined with other tools, it comes quite handy.

We drew an image of a web page layout and asked ChatGPT to create an HTML and CSS code that replicates the layout by invoking SceneXplain. The results weren’t too far off the mark.

To use the plugin, use a prompt like:

Explain this image: https://images.pexels.com/photos/7876708/pexels-photo-7876708.jpeg or list all the objects you see in this image: https://images.pexels.com/photos/7876708/pexels-photo-7876708.jpeg

8. There’s An AI For That

“There’s An AI For That” isn’t the most glamorous of plugins on the ChatGPT plugins store, but we found it quite useful. The tool provides you with a curated list of AI tools that can do any tasks you describe. Sure, you have the option of going into a long, endless round of Google searches that might not get you what you want. But you can simply let the specialized tool do the job of highlighting AI tools for whichever tasks you wish to complete. In an era where AI is at the forefront of most things in the tech space, “There’s An AI For That” can come in quite handy.

In the example below, we prompted ChatGPT to suggest some AI tools we can use to manipulate pictures into a music video. Some of it turned out to be a revelation.

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9. What to Watch

If you are a fan of movies and TV shows, then the “What to Watch” plugin is one worth installing. Describe the kind of movies or TV shows you want, and it will bring up plausible suggestions. Unfortunately, one major setback is that it isn’t hooked up to an updated movie database. When we prompted it for new movies, it failed to turn up any movie released after 2021.

If your prompting skills aren’t particularly strong, you’ll find it useful. However, if you know your way around ChatGPT prompts, you might be better off using your own ChatGPT prompts, in which case we recommend checking out our comprehensiveguide on using ChatGPT to decide what to watch next .

Embrace ChatGPT Plugins

If you’ve had an underwhelming experience with ChatGPT plugins, you’re not alone. However, you’ll find a number of useful ChatGPT plugins that extend the chatbot’s abilities if you look closely enough. While the plugin store is not as loaded with high-quality plugins as we’d hoped to see, take advantage of the available ones to make the best of your ChatGPT experience.