Use ChatGPT Plugins to Automate Work Across Apps (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: In this video, I'll show you exactly how to use ChatGBT plugins step-by-step. Plugins connect to ChatGBT to the apps you already use, like Gmail, Outlook, and Slack, so it can pull data and then actually do work for you. I'm David, and we'll start with the basics, like installing a plugin, plugin permissions, and just getting it to work, and then we'll move on to the more powerful stuff, like how to stack plugins together. By the end, you'll know how to use ChatGBT to get work done in other apps, so let's go. We're here in ChatGBT on a simple prompt and response. This is what a plugin looks like. It's part of this prompt that went to my Gmail and pulled back all the emails from the last 24 hours that still need my attention. You can click on it to see it ran a search in Gmail, and then ChatGBT ran the filter. Finally, it shows us the email to follow up on. To install a plugin yourself, open the left sidebar and click on Plugins. You'll see over 100 apps here split across 10 categories. There are over 1,000 plugins available, so the best way to find what you want is to search. The featured plugins up top are the most common. Here, you'll see communication and storage apps like Gmail, Slack, Calendar, Drive, and Outlook. Now, a few plugins work on the free plan of ChatGBT, but for most plugins, you'll need the paid plan. Outlook and Gmail require you to pay. With any plugin, you can click the plus icon to connect right away. To learn what it does first, click the app instead. Then scroll down to where it says App and Skill. You can click on the app to see all the actions the plugin can take. There are read actions, which search for and find data, and there are write actions, which actually do things. You see examples on screen like adding email attachments, creating reply drafts, or even sending email. You can also click under Skills to understand any additional context that ChatGBT uses with the plugin. This is interesting trivia for Outlook, but not needed to understand it. Now, to install it, click the Install Plugin button at the top right. You sign in with your account, and you're connected. There are two ways to use a plugin. The first is the way that I showed you at the start of the video. Here, ChatGBT uses the prompt to infer you want to use a plugin. You can also tell ChatGBT to use the plugin explicitly. Do that by typing the at symbol and then the name of the plugin. It shows up below the prompt box, and you can press Enter to select it. That's how you can do another simple email search. ChatGBT finds the right email, downloads the attachment, and puts it on screen. When you click the file, you'll open the PDF directly, but it's also nice to click the Outlook icon to go back to the original email. Now, that's a good start for plugins, but they can also do things, not just read emails. Before we do that, let's talk a little bit about plugin permissions. Permissions control what a plugin is allowed to do. To set those permissions, click on your profile in the bottom left, and then click Settings. Click on Plugins, and then let's click on Outlook to configure it. Click on Permissions, and you get four choices. With Always Ask, ChatGBT asks for your approval for anything it does with the plugin. This gets annoying pretty fast. With Allow Read Actions, ChatGBT can read and search your data, but it can't act or do those right actions without approval. Allow Low Risk Actions is the default. See, ChatGBT judges from context what counts as low risk. For example, drafting an email might be considered low risk. Then Allow All Actions means no checks at all. I don't recommend this. AI goes off the rail sometimes, and you wanna prevent that. Allow Read Actions is a good starting point. Remember, you can always loosen this later once you've watched it work a few times. Let's see how this plays out on a real email. We'll send an email to Adele asking when the next David's Donut Den charity bake sale is. That triggers this permission box, and this is your chance to check the message before it sends. Click See Details to see that message. You can see who it's addressed to, the subject, as well as the content of the email. This kind of looks like code, but just think of it like field names and field values. Now, if this is wrong, you'll wanna click Deny and then Correct ChatGBT. You can click Allow Once to approve this. ChatGBT then takes a few seconds, then sends the email, which we also see in my Sent folder. There are hundreds of other plugins out there, and a good one for your finances comes from today's sponsor, QuickBooks Online. This one has more than one skill, and you can read what each of them does by clicking in. So, as an example, I can ask something like, can you compare my donut shop's financials with the benchmarks from other donut shops? And that brings back a chart comparing my shop against others in my area. You can also stack plugins together, so take a look at this prompt. Can you turn my last email from Adele into an estimate? That uses the Gmail plugin to pull the email, then the QuickBooks plugin to send the estimate. Check out the link in the description below for 50% off QuickBooks Online for a limited time. That's how to use ChatGBT plugins to actually get work done every day. Now, if you wanna go deeper, I put together a full playlist covering everything ChatGBT, and down below, you'll also find a link to get 50% off QuickBooks Online for a limited time. Thanks for watching. See you in the next one.