Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Kyrabe Stories. Today, we have a special guest post from P.A. Raymond on using ChatGPT as a Virtual Assistant!
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Working from home or being a freelancer gives you that feeling of being alone at work. And I’m not going to lie—to some of us, this feeling is positive; we even prefer it overcrowded offices and many coworkers.
But in certain cases, especially as freelancers, we cannot help feeling alone or overwhelmed by the tasks that our line of work presents to us. This article applies mainly to freelancers because we can decide what tools we allow in our work environment with more freedom than a company, where we require authorization to use third-party tools or outright ban them.
ChatGPT has been within our reach for quite some time now. But it is still under development, and new updates keep coming. The first time I used ChatGPT for a task that showed me its potential was when a client asked me from which side of the plane, he could see the curvature of the earth better.
This is the kind of question that even your supervisor most likely wouldn’t know. But for some reason, I didn’t want to say I didn’t know. So, I asked the client for some time to find out and headed to ask ChatGPT for help. I was not sure if I could get a response but I figured that this was possible to learn, I simply didn’t have the time to gather all the knowledge required to have an answer before the client called it a lost cause.
I went ahead and gave the route to ChatGPT, from where to where, and I didn’t know if it was useful but the date as well. The AI produced a solid paragraph explaining why, depending on weather conditions, the left side of the plane would be a better option to see the curvature of the earth. The AI even handled the IATA signs. That’s a three-letter code that identifies all airports across the globe.
With my client satisfied with the information, I had the chance to assimilate ChatGPT’s potential. As I mentioned two paragraphs ago, it is time-saving, which is essential to freelancers working on multiple projects or a tight deadline.
Since that moment, I’ve found multiple uses for ChatGPT that you, dear readers, may not have explored yet. It’s important to mention that while I wrote this article about AI, it was all human-written, and while the tools I’ll mention ahead work best in the paid version of ChatGPT, the free version still holds strong usefulness for those who’d like to experiment without investing.
Expressing ideas
As a Spanish speaker, I often find myself in the struggle of wanting to say something in English and running into the risk of delivering a completely different idea. ChatGPT can catch the tones of your emails or texts and tell you insights that may pass over your head without you noticing it.
The way I normally do this is by writing what I want to send and sharing it with ChatGPT. I then ask the AI questions about the tone; I tell it the idea I’m aiming for and ask if it’s properly composed.
ChatGPT would then share with me a series of corrections and ideas that I then manually add to my email or message. I rarely ask the AI to rewrite it for me, which is still a plausible option for those who want to automate things a step further. As a writer, I still enjoy doing that part, but I want to make sure I’m sending what I feel as clearly as possible.
De-escalation of conflicts
Orally, I pride myself on knowing how to de-escalate an argument. I’ve found this more complicated during texts or emails. I usually branch out into several topics, defending arguments while trying to explain myself.
This has been a problem mostly in my personal life in very specific situations. But it’s something I believe to be useful in a conversation with a customer or a supervisor as well.
Again, I’d share with ChatGPT the interactions and start asking it questions about the conversation. ChatGPT is capable of sharing insights with me regarding how some things I wrote could be taken in a certain way. This is constantly helping me learn to interact in a way that I make sure I’m sharing my ideas in the most efficient way and without diverting to other topics that could complicate the argument.
Furthermore, making sure I share the conversations with ChatGPT in only one session, instead of creating one every time we chat, ChatGPT can help me keep a record of previous interactions with the same person.
I managed to keep track of topics that have been touched before, and arguments that I have addressed before, and this made it easier to keep control of an argument and redirect it to a healthier resolution.
In one of these sessions, I asked ChatGPT to give itself a name. Its response was to be called Nova, and that’s the name I addressed ChatGPT within that session. And this helped me organize the sessions I have with ChatGPT/Nova (which I will use interchangeably in the next section).
One session per task
If you go to ChatGPT, you’ll see that every time you enter you have the option to continue a previous conversation or chat, or start a new one. At first, I would enter ChatGPT, ask a question, and then leave. All the time on a new chat and I was starting to have a long list of chats on the left side of my screen. I didn’t know back then how much I was missing out on Nova’s record keeping.
You see, when you give information to ChatGPT, from time to time you’ll see a message saying updating memory or memory updated. This is a reference to the chat session – Nova is gathering information on that chat and what I just said is now being remembered. I’m yet to see the limitations of this but this brings another useful tool.
If you have multiple projects or multiple clients. It’s a good idea to open one chat per project or customer and only talk to ChatGPT about that topic there. Bear in mind that this feature of keeping track is part of the paid version, and if you use the free version, you’ll only have a limited number of interactions with ChatGPT a day before it offers you to buy the paid version. (You can alternatively resume the conversation the next day when you’ll be able to interact a bit more with it daily)
Having different chats will also help you know that you’re speaking with chat on each session and keep track of previous interactions separately. There is also a feature on each chat for you to rename the conversation into something easier to track and organize.
The more you chat with ChatGPT in a session, the more knowledgeable you become about the matter. This leads to more personalized assistance. You may then start asking it things such as. “Based on the way I’ve responded before…” and it will objectively help you keep the line of your previous ideas.
“Can you give me examples of previous times she’s mentioned this?” This is another example of useful questions that you can only ask ChatGPT after you’ve provided substantial information about previous conversations.
I also use this when I need help translating. But since translating a legal document, a birth certificate, a case study, and certified university grades are all different, I keep one session for each. This allows me to have accurate translations within the context and nature of what I’m dealing with.
How to start?
If you want to give this a shot but don’t know where to start. Create a main chat and name it: “reception,” “lobby,” or anything that lets you know that there’s where you will start if you don’t know what to do. Make sure to visit that session often and get to know ChatGPT.
Treat every chat as a specific department that deals with a specific topic. Remember that, as of now, ChatGPT is unable to “remember” information from a chat in another. So, it’s up to you to relay information worth sharing from one “department” to another.
Finally, remember that this is a tool made to make you feel better and more organized. Feel free to customize your experience. Erase chats you won’t need. Give special instructions on one chat and keep things different in another. Give it a name or ask it to give itself a name. But most importantly, make good use of a tool that’s here to make your freelancing easier.
Thanks again for the special guest post from P.A. Raymond on tips how to using ChatGPT as a Virtual Assistant!
And when it comes to discovering ways to optimize your life, strive to make it happen one story at a time!
Take care,
The Kyrabe Stories team
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