Charter is hosting its first AI-focused summit, Leading with AI, in New York City on January 30. Two of our sessions—“GenAI 102” and “Three ways of using genAI you have to try at work tomorrow”—address an observation of ours that many people are stuck using genAI in the same simple ways they’ve been using it for over a year now. They’ll use ChatGPT to draft an email, summarize a report, or analyze some data, but the experimentation stops there. Attendees will leave both of these sessions with new ideas on how they can use genAI in their work.
This is also a focus of ours. The Charter Pro Digest newsletter sometimes features an “AI tip of the week” with new ideas on how to use AI at work and in your personal life. As 2024 came to an end, I wondered: Out of all of those tips, which ones do I continue to use on a regular basis? I went through every single AI tip of the week I wrote last year—here’s what stuck:
1. Using Reader to convert articles into audio.
There was a lot of excitement last year about Google’s NotebookLM, which can turn any piece of text into a podcast. I was also impressed by this feature, and I use it from time to time. But I usually want to read the original article, itself, rather than an AI-synthesized version of it. ElevenLabs’s Reader app can convert text to audio, so I can listen to the article as it was originally written. If I’m on a walk or doing chores, I’ll upload the article I want to read into the Reader app and listen to it. The app is free and easy to use.
2. Using ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode to learn new things.
When ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode was released to the public, I was most excited by the prospect of using it to practice languages. I used to speak Russian at an advanced level, but I’m rusty after a few years without practice. Now, I can open the ChatGPT app on my phone and have a 15-minute conversation in Russian about whatever’s on my mind. I could see this being a great way to brush up on a language before traveling to some destination.
I’ve recently been even more excited about using voice mode to learn about new subjects. The beauty of this form of learning is that it’s hyperpersonalized—you can focus on the aspects of the topics you’re most confused about and keep asking questions until you understand. You can then test your understanding by asking voice mode to quiz you.
WHAT TO TRY
Here are some tactics I’ve found useful for using voice mode to learn about topics:
- Interrupt it when you’ve missed something or if you’re confused about what it said.
- Ask for analogies when you’re struggling to understand something.
- Repeat back to it your understanding of the concept and ask it to tell you if you’ve understood it correctly.
3. Using Claude or ChatGPT to search for information in my source material.
I wrote earlier last year about how I used ChatGPT while writing a Work Tech article about the best AI-powered search engines. I primarily used it to:
- Summarize my notes about each search engine.
- Help me rank the search engines based on my notes, with me pushing back when I disagreed with its interpretation.
- Find specific examples from my notes that illustrate my point while I write.
Out of all three, the third use has continued to be the most helpful for me. I write articles that pull information from interviews, academic papers, my notes, and other news articles. While writing, I’ll sometimes upload my source material into Claude and ask questions like, “Do any of the documents have information on [topic]?” or “I remember seeing a stat that suggested [concept]. Can you help me find it in my documents?” This helps me spend more time thinking about the story and less time searching through my notes.
4. Using ChatGPT or Claude to give me code that automates tasks.
I’ve written about how genAI allows everyone to do a little bit of everything. An outcome of that is that non-technical workers can build bespoke tools and workflows that help with their jobs. Building GPTs, customized versions of ChatGPT, is one example of this. Another example involves having ChatGPT or Claude produce code you can use to automate a task.
I built one such automation that sends me an email every afternoon with all of the AI stories from the publications I follow. ChatGPT gave me the code, which I ran in Google Apps Script, a platform that lets you build integrations and automations across Google products. Now, every day at 3pm, I get an email with all of the AI stories I should read that day.
This article originally appeared in Charter Pro. You can sign up for Pro here.
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