These ChatGPT Plugins Can Boost Your Productivity With AI

By Jason Nelson

In a scant few months, OpenAI's ChatGPT has revolutionized the way people work, and the introduction of plugins for GPT-4 has further expanded its capabilities, providing users with even more versatile and powerful tools for improving productivity.

Sorting through the hundreds of add-ons for GPT-4 may seem daunting, but Decrypt has you covered with a list of the seven productivity plugins you should try today.

What is a ChatGPT Plugin?

A ChatGPT plugin is a software add-on that developers build that integrates other applications into ChatGPT's AI chatbot, enabling features beyond what ChatGPT was initially intended to provide. These plugins manage the interaction between the application and the ChatGPT API.

Here is a list of powerful plugins designed to make searching the internet, reading documents, and calculations easier.

1. ScholarAI

With ScholarAI, you can get summaries, full text, or citations of scientific literature with only the URL to a PDF published on the web. Along with providing the necessary information, ScholarAI will also provide links to books or other sources where relevant content can be found. A helpful addition to the plugin is that it will refer the user back to the original PDF URL if it does not know the answer to a given question instead of making up an answer through AI hallucinations.

2. Link Reader

Link Reader is a ChatGPT plugin that allows you to process web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, and more. After providing a URL, the plugin will generate a summary of the content and then can be asked specific questions related to it. Link Reader also works on Google Docs URLs—but be sure the document is set to be accessible to "anyone with the link." The plugin also includes an option for searching the open internet for answers.

3. Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha was one of the first applications to create a plugin for ChatGPT, bringing its natural language computational skills to GPT-4. As with the web version, asking Wolfram Alpha a mathematical problem will generate an answer. Wolfram Alpha will attempt to provide as much information as possible, including a breakdown of the results and any charts or graphs to support its responses.

4. Social Search

This plugin lets you search for the latest tweets, images, and media of an account on social media. For example, a search of a specific Twitter account will provide the last five tweets, if available, and what type of engagement that tweet received.

5. DeFiLlama

With thousands of blockchain projects out there, sorting through the data can be daunting. DeFiLlama, from the creators of the popular analysis website, provides one of a growing list of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related GPT-4 plugins that allow you to gather real-time data across multiple blockchains. Some of the data DeFiLlama says its plugin can pull include information on protocols, total value locked, top gainers, growers, and losers.

Using Plugins

When installing plugins, it's helpful first to ask ChatGPT, and the plugin, how to use it. In most cases, ChatGPT will explain how the plugin works and what commands to use.

With any plugin, it's necessary to double-check the information provided before attempting to use it in any way. AI hallucination remains a significant issue in the development of artificial intelligence, a problem that OpenAI says it is actively trying to solve.

This list is just a start. From students using the chatbot to help with homework and exams to HR professionals using it to write termination letters, the possibilities of what the over 400 plugins in the ChatGPT store mean for workplace productivity are endless.

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