ChatGPT is an experimental artificial intelligence tool with amazing capabilities. Its ability to use its large language model to quickly answer questions on many topics, explain complex concepts in various ways, and create content has already changed the way we use the internet. But like all artificial intelligence tools, ChatGPT is only as good as the data and information it has access to – which is often out of date or not specific enough.

In March 2023, OpenAI, ChatGPT's parent organization, announced experimental support for ChatGPT plugins that allowed various developers and companies to provide ChatGPT with authorized access to their third-party datasets. This functionality allows ChatGPT to become even more powerful by giving it access to specific, high-quality data and applications that serve as extensions to its power. Developers and researchers quickly began work integrating their products and datasets with ChatGPT.

Plugins are now much more advanced – there are now hundreds of ChatGPT plugins – but a few stand above the rest in usefulness and capabilities. We'll highlight 5 useful ChatGPT plugins, explain why we think they are useful, and provide guidelines on how to best use them.

Definitive Facts

As we mentioned above, the more data ChatGPT has, the better it is at solving problems and producing interesting insights. Because ChatGPT is trained on a large swath of the web, one of its challenges is that it sometimes uses old or limited datasets in a conversation. This can severely limit its applications, especially in research or fact-finding.

The Definitive Facts ChatGPT Plugin gives you access to a collection of over one hundred high-quality relational databases from their website. They have a wide array of datasets, from baseball stats to sales on electric cars, to concert data for famous bands.

Queries on these types of databases used to require advanced knowledge of coding languages like SQL, but the Definitive Facts ChatGPT plugin allows anyone to ask complex, nuanced questions and get back precise answers in seconds. Like a conversation with a highly knowledgeable, data-driven friend!

Essentially, the Definitive Facts ChatGPT plugin gives anyone the ability to use ChatGPT as a research and insights tool. It's especially useful for students who are writing research papers and researchers looking for trends or unique insights.

In order to get the most out of the Definitive Facts ChatGPT plugin, the Definitive team suggests you be both explanatory and direct. For example, if you wanted to learn which MLB rookies were playing well this year, you might ask,

"Show top ten rookies based on OBP

• rookie is defined as a player whose first season is this current season
• minimum of 100 at bats"

Eraser

Some people are visual learners – a flowchart or relationship map can go a long way to helping explain a concept or connecting the dots. Thankfully the team at Eraser built a ChatGPT plugin that can create impressive diagrams from just text.

The Eraser ChatGPT plugin ingests the text that you provide to it, figures out what kind of diagram would best help explain the concept, and then sketches out a diagram that you can later edit as you need to.

The Eraser is super useful in a wide variety of use cases, but it is especially helpful for software engineers and other roles that spend time brainstorming, visualizing, and documenting recurring processes.

Opentable

There are some really interesting third-party food, restaurant, and nutrition ChatGPT plugins, but none have the functionality or usefulness of OpenTable's ChatGPT plugin.

OpenTable is a well-respected restaurant discovery, reservation, and review site. Its ChatGPT plugin allows you to specify a day, time, location, party size, and any dining preferences or dietary restrictions. From there the ChatGPT plugin produces a list of restaurants that fulfill your requests. You can then easily click on any of the restaurants to make a quick reservation!

The OpenTable ChatGPT plugin takes something that is a fairly common occurrence – trying to find a good place to eat that has reservations open – and makes it much simpler and easier.

To get the most out of the OpenTable ChatGPT plugin, try to be as specific as you can. Explain the type of restaurants you usually like, the budget, any dietary restrictions, the city or part of the city you are searching in, and more. The more guidance you give the plugin the more helpful it can be.

Clay

We may be a little biased because this is one of the ChatGPT plugins we've built, but we think the Clay ChatGPT plugin is extremely useful :)

Clay is a relationship management app that imports everyone you know from your LinkedIn, Facebook, contacts, iMessage, email, and calendar. After connecting and importing your contacts, Clay deduplicates your contacts and creates a beautiful profile for them, filled with information about them from around the web (their work history from LinkedIn, for example). With Clay, you have a single collection of everyone you know.

One of the challenges of using ChatGPT to write emails or text messages is that it has no context for the people you know, so you often need to do significant work to make the email more personalized and specific.

The Clay ChatGPT plugin gives ChatGPT the power of knowing about your relationships. This means that ChatGPT can draft an email that is highly personalized to your last meeting notes with the recipient. Or, ChatGPT can create a travel itinerary (perhaps using another ChatGPT extension!) based on the locations and preferences of the people you are visiting.

Clay enables ChatGPT to help you thoughtfully manage your relationships.

Speak

There are several language and translation ChatGPT extensions and applications, but Speak is the most useful because it is the most thorough and intelligent. Not only does Speak translate into many languages for you, but it also gives you extra context on why it answers the way that it does. Speak (by a company of the same name) is designed to help you learn a language, not just receive a basic translation.

Speak will even help you by showing situations and how a conversation would play out. This helps you gain an understanding of the way the language operates in various scenarios.

In order to get the most out of Speak, feel free to give it guidelines or the context of the translation you need. By explaining the situation and level of formality you can get a precise and helpful answer from Speak.

Conclusion

ChatGPT is the most important product yet to be built on top of a large language model, and developers and researchers are rushing to integrate their third-party applications with the tool.

Five ChatGPT plugins stand out amongst the hundreds in terms of usability and functionality: Definitive Facts, Erase, OpenTable, Clay, and Speak. Whether you need reservations, help parsing databases, information about your relationships, translation help, or assistance visualizing data, these plugins are useful.

We'll keep this article up to date as new plugins come out, too!