?? Get More Bang for Your ChatGPT Buck: 9 Things You (Probably) Didn't Know It Could Do

Hello fellow Non-Techies,

I’m baaaack! I took an extended newsletter break to regroup, but I’m back, full of AI-shaped beans and raring to go. I’ve written you a longer issue to make up for it this week.

This issue, while everyone is still raving on the big Deepseek hype train, we’ll be focusing on something a bit more familiar - helping you maximise your ChatGPT bang-for-your-buck. I’m going to show you 10 new features you (probably) weren’t aware of yet.

But before we do that, hang onto your hats - I have a couple of very exciting AI for Non-Techies announcements to share with you.

NEW: AI for Marketers: Live (Manchester + London)

Tickets are finally LIVE for our live in-person, AI for Marketers training days here in the UK.

In these cram-packed full day workshops, we’ll teach you powerful marketing prompts, demo loads of cool AI tools and help you build robust AI workflows. We’ve got 10 earlybird tickets at ￡100 off for each event, so grab yours before they disappear…

• Grab tickets for Manchester on 24 April?
• Grab tickets for London on 30 May

Looking to book a group? Drop me an email: [email protected]

FREE Webinar, 10x Your Productivity with AI (This Thursday)

I’m joining forces with the mighty Adam Biddlecombe from Mindstream to discuss how to 10x your productivity using AI in a new, completely free webinar this week.

Here’s what we’re covering:

• How to write a great AI prompt
• Choosing the right tools for YOU, not just what’s trending
• Building Custom GPTs & Claude Projects
• How to get your team on board, even the AI skeptics

Click here to add it to your calendar.

Ooh - and one more thing, we’re hiring for an Academy Community & Growth Manager too. If you’d like to apply, you’ve got two more weeks.

OK, right, that’s you up to date. Let’s do this thing…

9 Things You (Probably) Didn’t know ChatGPT Can Do

I call ChatGPT the “Swiss army knife” of AI chatbots for good reason. It’s cram-packed with innovative tools and features, way more than any of the other chatbots.

The thing is, it doesn’t actually tell you about them, they’re just suddenly there. Often with confusing names, and even more confusing tech-babble filled videos. Unless you’re a bit of an AI nerd (guilty) following the OpenAI blog or big AI influencers online, you’ll very easily miss this stuff.

Never fear, I’m here to make sure you’re getting the max for your ChatGPT buck:

#1: It can control your computer

Feature Name: Operator

A couple of weeks ago, ChatGPT Pro users (that’s the super expensive $200/mo one) had access to Operator.? I sat and watched the live demo by OpenAI, which is 23 minutes long, and here are the key points for you:

• It takes over your computer, a bit like IT helplines can, if you’ve ever used remote assistance. It feels weird, like a ghost is controlling your computer
• BUT you still have full control when it does - and it can’t see what you’re doing, even when it has control
• It keeps the ‘human-in-the-loop’, and asks for confirmation at all important steps
• The demo showed some fairly simple processes that don’t take long to do normally- e.g. booking a table at a restaurant. I’d be keen to see more complex use cases.

I’m going to be getting ChatGPT Pro soon, and I’ll report back as to how this works/feels. If anybody already has it, please do reply to this email and let me know your thoughts.

#2: You can call it on the phone

Yes, really.? Even if you don’t have an account, you can call ChatGPT and interact with it on a phone call.?The number is 1-800-CHATGPT, and US users get 15 minutes of chat free.?

Now, I can’t say I’ve ever uttered the words “damn, I wish I could CALL ChatGPT, that would be so much easier”, but er…yeah.? Haven’t got much more to say about that, really.

You can also WhatsApp it by scanning here:

#4: You can tell it how to treat you?

Feature name: New Advanced Customisation

We can now customise the way ChatGPT interacts with you, with custom instructions that are genuinely useful for once.

Tell it what to call you, what job you do, what sort of personality it should have in its responses, and anything else that it might find useful for your interactions, and apparently, it’ll actually remember it (unlike the previous iteration of custom instructions, which were a bit crap).?

We’ve had Memories for a while now, a function which ‘remembers’ or ‘forgets’ things when you explicitly ask it to, e.g. “Remember I’m an AI trainer”.? Problem is, it also picks up other random tidbits…as an AI trainer always using random examples with clients, it’s got a very confused idea of who I am.?

It’s great - but perhaps not as strong as Gemini Advanced remembering your past chats…

#5: It can see the world around you, live

Feature name: Advanced Voice Mode - with vision

Apart from its occasional lags, Advanced Voice Mode is actually pretty brilliant.? I’ve had long?conversations with it and it’s very rarely baffled, no matter how much I go round in circles with my thinking.

Well, now you can share your camera with it as you’re talking, and it can “see”.? I demo this to my clients by having a little chat, then switching on the camera mode and showing it around the room, asking it to describe what’s happening.? I’ll get a “I can see a room full of people in a bright, modern office, they look like they’re listening to what you’re saying” sort of response.?

Far more useful would be its accessibility abilities - those with sight impairments could now see what tins are on the shelves in front of them in the supermarket, for example, as apparently very few products have braille.?

#6: It can organise your stuff

Feature name: Projects

Until now, any regular user of ChatGPT (or any chatbot, for that matter) will have felt frustrated by the fact you can’t organise?your chats. That chat history gets lengthy, quickly, and it’d fiddly to find old stuff.

Well, finally, along comes Projects, and finally we can organise ourselves. You’ll find them down the left side, above your chat history.

First, it gives you folders, so you can set them up, name them, then drag old chats into them. You can also start new chats directly from within those folders too, and everything is nice and neat.

But that’s not all - you can also apply settings to each of those folders, so any new chats will abide by them. Say, you have a folder about a client, you can set it up with knowledge and files about that client - a tone of voice guide, specific preferences, etc. More details here.

#7: It can create epic movies

Feature name: Sora

When it comes to image and video, ChatGPT’s always been a bit behind.? DallE-3, its inbuilt image generator, isn’t very good.? So it came as a bit of a surprise when they released Sora, an outstanding AI video creator.

After teasing it for seemingly AGES, it’s finally here.? Well, annoyingly, not for the UK it isn’t - we’re pretty late to receive things due to Europe’s regulatory concerns over this sort of thing.? Here’s a list of supported countries, but the rest are apparently on the way.?

But the US have had this for a while now, and have been getting creative.

Check this short film out, made entirely with Sora:

#8: It can schedule tasks for you

Feature name: Tasks

It’s quite a simple feature compared to some of the major updates (check out 9 and 10 below) but, I think they’re preparing us for agentic abilities (i.e. AI being able to actually take action for us, not just tell us stuff).

Here’s how to use it:

Step 1: Click on the model option button (top left in any new chat) and pick GPT4o with schedule tasks (catchy)

Step 2: Ask it to create you a task. Perhaps “check the weather in Birmingham each day at 7am and advise me how to dress to stay warm/cool”

Step 3: It’ll create it for you. This means you get a push notification in the app and/or an email, with a button that takes you to the result, within ChatGPT. It looks like this:

And that’s it. It’s a simple automated tool but could be great when used for researching newsletters perhaps, or keeping an eye on competitor activity.

#9: It can take on Deepseek

Alright, alright - I’ll talk about Deepseek juuust a little (I’ll do a dedicated newsletter when I’ve got a wider range of my own experiments to show you).

Deepseek came out, a new Chinese chatbot in a world dominated by American chatbots, in a blaze of “wow this is so clever” mixed with “wow, you’re going to steal all our data”. It’s a (relatively) new type of AI chatbot: Reasoning.

Up until now, with the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot, we’ve had great all-purpose, every day chatbots. They suit everyday queries like content creation, basic analysis, ideation, simulated scenarios, etc. But they don’t think deeply and they often get confused by numbers. Not so with this new batch of ‘reasoning’ models.

To counter Deepseek’s insanely successful launch, they released o3-mini, their own reasoning model. Let’s ignore the very confusing 3, 3.5, 4, 4o…er…o1, o3 naming convention from OpenAI for now.

o3-mini works in a completely different way to “think” deeply about a situation and answer it in a step-by-step way. Give it a complex problem and it will break it down carefully, in the same way an intelligent human would. Though it’s designed more for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathemathics) queries, and is apparently incredible for coding too, I’ve been using it for:

• Complex multi-channel marketing strategies for new services
• Pricing for my new 12 month enterprise training programme
• Helping me prioritise my tasks, given lists of dependencies

Anything you need a couple of days to think through, map out, research, look at multiple sides of, it seems to grasp in seconds/minutes. But don’t bother using it for your everyday stuff, it’s not so good at that.

You can access o3-mini using any paid ChatGPT account.

#10: It’s a Scarily Good Researcher Now

Last but not least, we have Deep Research. Fancy a PhD-level researcher in your pocket? I certainly bloody do. It’s available only to Pro users right now - but skip to my bonus tip at the end and you’ll see a way to get it without the hefty price tag. ??

I asked it to “Tell me about generative AI adoption in the UK financial planning market”. It took around 3 minutes to answer the question, as it went down several routes of enquiry, trying to find the right information (and telling me its ‘thought process’ as it went).

Then it created me a full, well-structured report. I’ve saved the report, and its cited sources, into a G doc so you can have a dig through. Click here to have a look.

Wow. Just wow. Research will never be the same again.

???Bonus Top Tip: You can actually access Deep Research, DeepSeek and o3-mini all for $20/mo within Perplexity Pro. (Sounds like an ad, isn’t an ad.)

And a sneaky eleventh...did you know it can analyse marketing data conversationally using Advanced Data Analysis mode? Just paste in your campaign stats and ask it questions like a normal conversation.?

With only 47% of marketers understanding how to use AI effectively, this is a game-changer for making data-driven decisions. Want to learn more about AI in marketing? HubSpot's CMO Kipp Bodnar is running a live session next Tuesday on what marketing teams are doing differently in 2025. It's happening at 3pm GMT and won't be recorded. Join me by clicking here. (Sounds like an ad, is an ad).

Right, that’s it for me for this week. I’ll be back weekly from now on,

Speak very soon,

Heather

PS If you’re looking to learn more about AI, join my affordable AI Academy at just ￡25/$31 per month. You get live training, courses, member events and masterclasses on tap. Check out what one of our members had to say yesterday: