Certain uses of an AI assistant may be more obvious than others. You’ve seen that you can ask questions, or prompt it to provide you with information on a specific topic. You can use AI to write the initial draft of an entire blog post, or ask it to improve a particular sentence. But every day people are finding new and creative ways to use AI in their workflows to help with efficiency. Let’s explore a couple of those uses now.

Before we dig in, there are some things to keep in mind:

Format: Depending on what tool you’re using, you won’t be able to give it a PDF or Word file, or even a link to a specific webpage. So you’ll need to type or paste text in with your prompt so that the AI has the materials necessary to complete the task.

Length constraints: ChatGPT has a character and token limit which varies depending on which version or tool you’re using. This means you can’t paste all of the text from a very long piece of content directly, but you can provide specific sections from the content, or a shorter summary of the main points.

Specificity: While ChatGPT is good at generating content based on prompts, the quality of the output will largely depend on the clarity and specificity of the summary or details you provide.

Iterative process: It might require a few iterations or tweaking of the prompt to get the desired results.

The world is filled with various platforms where information is shared, from chatty social media sites to professional newsletters. Each platform has its own style, and content should feel at home wherever it’s posted. 

Let’s imagine you just had ChatGPT write a draft blog post. To share a snippet on  X (formerly Twitter) you might need a catchy two-liner, or for a newsletter, a brief summary with a link to read more. With ChatGPT, you can ask for these adaptations directly using post-output iteration: “Can you now summarize that blog post in two lines for Twitter?” or “How would you introduce this topic in a newsletter?” By being specific about the platform, you guide the AI to generate content that not only informs but fits perfectly with the intended medium.

If you have an article of your own on your website, you can paste in the entire blog post, or a portion of it, for the AI assistant to work with. 

For example, we asked ChatGPT “Can you summarize the following blog post into two lines for Twitter?” and then pasted all of the text from this post: New Course: Turn Your Passion Into Impact by Building an Online Course↗︎

Below is a screenshot of the results, and additional iterations we expanded with:

You’ll notice that the prompt for the email newsletter excerpt shows 3/3. This is because we weren’t happy with the first two versions it provided. So in this case, we revised the prompt to get more specific about what we were looking for.

The first prompt was: “Super. Now, how would you introduce this topic in a newsletter?” and the result was more suitable for a print style newsletter or a dedicated email just covering this topic.

The second prompt was: “Super. Now, can you provide an excerpt of less than 200 words to use in an email newsletter?” but the response was broken up into 3 paragraphs and was still too long.

The third prompt, shown in the screenshot, produced a much better output for what we were looking for. It’s still not perfect, because for one, none of our courses require enrollment. But ChatGPT doesn’t know that, because we didn’t tell it and the information wasn’t stated in the original article either. Even so, the result provided was still well written and a great starting point. Even better, the process only took a couple of minutes, including reading time of the responses.

FAQs are often those popular questions that almost everyone has on their minds. They’re quick, to-the-point, and designed to help people find answers without sifting through tons of information. 

This one is often an aha moment for users, because yes, you can utilize ChatGPT to generate possible FAQs based on a summary or the main points of a page of content. Sometimes, ChatGPT also likes to be an overachiever and provide you with more than you expected!

Example:

Let’s say you have content about a new eco-friendly water bottle:

Content Summary:

“The AquaGreen bottle is an eco-friendly water container made from 100% recycled materials. It keeps liquids cold for up to 24 hours and hot for up to 12 hours. Its unique design prevents leaks and spills. It’s available in three sizes and five colors. A portion of every purchase goes to clean water initiatives.”

Prompt to ChatGPT:

“Based on the provided summary about the AquaGreen bottle, generate five potential FAQs.”

Here’s a screenshot of what happened:

Your imagination is the only limit on what you can use an AI assistant for. Think about your day-to-day tasks, the content you need to create, the pieces that you don’t enjoy or struggle with, and consider working with AI to help make that task go smoother and more quickly.