The 10 best ChatGPT plugins of 2023 (and how to make the most of them)

Here's a tie. Both the Expedia and the KAYAK transportation and hotel plugins are quite good. Both deliver human-like responses to simple questions: "What's the best three-star hotel rate in mid-town Manhattan between July 10th and 14th?" They also do well with more open-ended, subtle questions such as "What're the most fun things to do in Chicago in the summer with my eight-year-old between August 1st and 3rd?" Neither listed the Cubs games at Wrigley Field -- Bad AI, Bad! -- but both suggested reasonable kid-friendly activities.

However, you do need to look carefully at their results. For example, KAYAK, when I asked for city-center Munich hotels under 300 Euros, the top two answers were well above my price point. 

Used with caution, both are useful. Unfortunately, you can't use them together to fine-tune the answers you need for your next business trip. Still, since travel agents are as rare as hen's teeth these days, it's well worth using them. 

A lot of valuable information is stored in PDF files. The problem is pulling the answers from them, as PDF is not a researcher-friendly format. Numerous plugins can work with PDFs, but Ask Your PDF is the best. 

This plugin does just what the name says. It reads through a PDF to find the answers to your questions. This can be very helpful. However, unlike the other best plugins, you need to work outside ChatGPT before it works. Here's how to do it:

Manually upload the PDF to the AskYourPDF service with these steps:

1. Go to AskYourPDF Upload Page.

2. Click on the "Upload Document" button.

3. Select the PDF file you want to upload from your device.

4. Once the upload is complete, you will receive a document ID (doc_id).

You paste the doc_id into your ChatGPT query and use it to extract information from the PDF with the plugin.

It takes a bit of work, but the results are excellent. Unlike most ChatGPT and plugins, it gives you exactly where the information comes from within the document. If you work a lot with PDFs, or even if you only do it once in a blue moon, this is one handy utility. 

Since you can't use Bing search with plugins -- darn it! -- the next best thing is Link Reader. It also does just what the name says: It lets you pull up information for a specific page. 

But, you can also use it for more general topics. So, for example, the query: "I want to catch up on the latest news concerning Ukraine, can you compile a list of articles for me to read? LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/us" will deliver you news from The Guardian and other news sites. 

In early August, OpenAI took Link Reader offline for unknown reasons. But, as of September 9th, it's back. Still, sometimes--and I've yet to find the rhyme or reason to it--Link Reader simply won't work. When that happens, try another useful plugin that does the same job WebPilot. 

Generally speaking, Link Reader does better if you point it at a specific link, while WebPilot works well at general web searching. WebPilot is also more stable. 

Hungry? Don't cook? Let the OpenTable plugin help. With it you can ask questions, just as if you had an expert local foodie friend, and get good answers.

Alas, good isn't always perfect. For example, when I asked it about Indian restaurants in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, it gave me a decent list, but it somehow missed the 2022 James Beard Award winner for Outstanding Restaurant Chai Pan. Whoops! Still, it gives you a start for making a reservation for tonight's dinner. 

And if you want to cook a meal yourself, there's always Instacart. With this plugin, you can create a "shoppable" list of the ingredients to make a perfect meal. Since my cooking abilities begin and end with boiling water for in the box mac and cheese, I leave it to you to decide how well it does. 

Asking the right question is most of the battle for getting good results from ChatGPT. It's not that easy. But with Prompt Perfect, you don't need to be an AI Prompt Engineer -- yes, that's a real job title these days -- to get better answers. 

Just start your query with "Perfect," jot down the rest of it, and Prompt Perfect will take it from there. Of course, the better you can craft your queries, the better job Prompt Perfect can do for you. 

For example, when I asked, "Perfect: Create a travel plan for a week-long trip to Bilbao, Spain, with a $1,000 budget," it returned a much more comprehensive and useful prompt. This "Perfect" prompt read: "Please develop a comprehensive itinerary for a one-week vacation in Bilbao, Spain, considering a $1,000 budget. Your plan should include details on transportation, lodging, food, activities, and any other relevant information that will help ensure a successful and enjoyable trip. Please consider factors such as seasonality, cultural events, and must-see destinations when crafting your itinerary." 

The former gave me a general trip outline without any details. The second gave me precise information, even including what buses to take and their prices. 

Some people learn really well from videos. YouTube has endless tutorials on any subject you can imagine. Some of us, like yours truly, learn best from the written word. For us, VoxScript can be a lifesaver. It can grab a video transcript and let you quickly pullout useful information

That's good, but what it can't do is generate transcripts from YouTube videos that don't already have them. However, soon, many more videos will come with transcripts. That's because Google is integrating YouTube with its AI-powered dubbing and translation service, Aloud, to provide automatic YouTube transcripts.

You can also use it to search for current web information. While this is still very much a work in progress, VoxScript also lets you search Google results via DuckDuckGo. If they can perfect this, VoxScript will be a killer ChatGPT app.

You may have noticed that I keep harping on how you can't trust ChatGPT, or any of its rivals, for accurate answers. That's because you can't. The AI chatbots give you what sounds like the right answer. That does not mean it is the right answer. 

You can use the WolframAlpha expert systems to get the correct answers to math problems and many other questions. Long before AI was anything except science fiction to the public, WolframAlpha was delivering accurate information to its customers. Indeed, accuracy is the name of its game. 

Together you can get the benefits of both. Now, it's not good for everything. Technical, medical questions: Yes. What do I do about the flu? Not so much. Stay home, sleep a lot, and eat lots of chicken soup. 

But for those areas, such as math, physics, and finance, where it's good, it's very, very good indeed. 

I'm not a big Wikipedia fan, but many people rely on the online encyclopedia for information. It makes sense to combine ChatGPT and Wikipedia to get the best of both. Now, Wikipedia's editors know that generative AI is a major threat to their crowd-sourced encyclopedia. After all, what is ChatGPT if not an automated version of a crowd-sourced answer machine? As one Wikipedia editor recently told the New York Times, "It wouldn't surprise me if things are fine for the next three years, and then, all of a sudden, in Year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff."

We'll see how that works out. In the meantime, I found ChatGPT + Wikipedia to be accurate about older, established information. For example, it gave me a decent summary of the symphonies of Ralph Vaughan-Williams, but a generalized round-up of New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers was fuzzy. Indeed, it didn't tell me that he's now the Jet's QB, even though that information is in Wikipedia. Mind you, now that he's torn his Achilles tendon, he won't be anyone QB for the rest of the year.

So, once more, I can only tell you this is a useful plugin, but you can't accept its results as Gospel truth. 

As you might have guessed from my numerous articles on the best online TV streaming platforms and best free streaming services, I watch a lot of television. Finding what services have the right shows is a major pain. There are websites that can help with that, but wouldn't it be nice if ChatGPT could do it for you? Well, thanks to the What to Watch plugin, it can.

It's not perfect, but it's reasonably good. For example, it spotted my trick question about Homicide: Life on the Street. That's one of the all-time great police movies, but it's not available on any streaming platform. And, no, you can't have my DVDs. 

But, it does make the occasional goof. For instance, the 10th season of Father Brown is out now, but not all the streaming services it lists have the newly released 10th season. 

Still, it's a lot better than digging through one service after another for your favorite obscure show. 

Some people use Microsoft Office programs. Me? I use the Google family and Slack for a lot of my work. Wouldn't it be nice if I could organize it so that ChatGPT could, for example, pull out my schedule for the coming week from Google Calendar and then e-mail it to my co-workers via Gmail, and message my fellow Slackers with it on Monday morning? Thanks to the Zapier plugin, I can do exactly that. 

Getting everything just right to pull these operations off can be tedious, but the Zapier plugin will help you work out the details. Once it's done, you can use it from now until retirement.

It's a nice trick, which you can use for much more advanced workflow processing. If you want to cut out a lot of busy work, give it a try. You'll be glad you did.