As long as you’ve signed up for the ChatGPT Plus package ($20 a month), you can make use of custom GPTs—Generative Pre-trained Transformers. These are chatbots with a specific purpose in mind, whether it’s vacation planning or scientific research, and there are a huge number of them to choose from.
They’re not all high-quality, but several are genuinely useful; I’ve picked out our favorites below. To find them, just click Explore GPTs in the left-hand navigation bar in ChatGPT on the web. Once you’ve installed a particular GPT, you’ll be able to get at it from the same navigation bar.
These GPTs have replaced plugins on the platform, and offer more focused experiences and features than the general ChatGPT bot. A lot of them also come with extra knowledge that ChatGPT doesn’t have, and you can even have a go at creating your own: From the GPTs directory, click + Create up in the top right corner.
Kayak
Travel portal Kayak has its very own GPT, ready to answer any questions you might have regarding a particular destination or how to get there. Ask about the best time to visit a city, or about the cost of a flight somewhere, or some places you can get to on a particular budget. It’s great for getting inspiration about a trip or working out the finer details, and when I tested it on my home city of Manchester, UK, the answers that it came up with were reassuringly accurate—it even correctly told me the price you’ll currently pay for a beer.
Hot Mods
The Dall-E image generator (another OpenAI property) is built right into ChatGPT, so you get image creation and manipulation tools out of the box, but Hot Mods is a bit more specific: It takes pictures you’ve already got and turns them into something else. Add new elements, change the lighting or the vibe, swap out the background, turn photos into paintings and vice versa, and so on. The image transformations aren’t always spot on—such is the nature of AI art—but you can have a lot of fun playing around with this.
Tweak and transform existing images with Hot Mods.
Credit: Lifehacker
Wine Sommelier
Want to know the perfect wine for a particular dish, event, or time of year? Of course you do, which is why Wine Sommelier can be so helpful. Put it to the test and it’ll tell you which wines go well with chicken salad, which wines suit a vegan diet, and which wines will be well-received at a wedding. You can also quiz the GPT on related topics, like wine production processes or vineyards of note. Whether you’re a wine expert or you want some tips on how to become one, the Wine Sommelier bot is handy to have around.
Canva
You might already be familiar with Canva’s straightforward and intuitive graphic design tools on the web and mobile, and its official GPT enables you to get creative inside the ChatGPT interface as well. Everything from posters to flyers to social media posts is covered, and you can be as deliberate or as vague as you like when it comes to the designs Canva comes up with. The GPT is able to produce text for your projects as well as images, and will ask you questions if it needs more guidance about the graphics you’re asking for.
SciSpace
SciSpace is an example of a GPT that brings a wealth of extra knowledge with it, above and beyond ChatGPT’s own training data—it can dig into more than 278 million research papers, in fact, so you’re able to ask it any question to get the latest academic thinking on a particular topic. Whether you want to know about potential links between exercise and heart health, or whale migration patterns, or anything else, SciSpace has you covered. You can also upload research papers and ask the bot to analyze and summarize them for you.
Coloring Book Hero can create all kinds of designs for you.
Credit: Lifehacker
Coloring Book Hero
This is a great idea: Get AI to produce custom coloring books for you, based around any idea or subject you like. Obviously you’re going to need a printer as well (unless you’re doing the coloring digitally), but there’s a lot of fun to be had in playing around with designs and topics—you can even upload your own images and have them converted to coloring book format. Some of the usual AI weirdness does occasionally creep in to the pictures, but they’re mostly spot on in terms of bold, black lines and big white spaces.
Wolfram
Wolfram Alpha is one of the best resources on the web, an outstanding collection of algorithms and knowledge, and the Wolfram GPT brings a lot of this usefulness into ChatGPT as well. This bot is perfect for complex math calculations and graphs, for conversions between different units, and for asking questions about any of the knowledge gathered by humanity so far. The breadth of the capabilities here is seriously impressive, and when needed the GPT is able to pull data and images from Wolfram Alpha seamlessly.
