Hands-on with ChatGPT's new browsing and plugin features

ChatGPT has added two really amazing new features to the premium service. In addition to access to GPT-4, you can now also use the browsing feature and 3rd party plugins.

Adding browsing to the service means it can now search the internet to enhance responses and ensure they are up to date, as the regular version is only trained on data up to September 2021. ChatGPT is now very good at finding, sorting and citing data on an incredibly broad range of topics.

Some interesting use cases I have seen:

• Finding the top 10 trending topics on a particular subreddit, sorted in to a table with links and brief overviews
• Summarising web pages, articles and other online content in to digestible chunks
• Analysing the algorithm for Twitter (available online) and making suggestions on how to go viral with your content
• Finding recommendations on coffee shops in a particular location, based on reviews and suggested criteria
• Detailed analysis of a social media profile

There are countless more, with people putting the service through its paces on a variety of complex topics and detailed outputs. Notice the interpretation of 'not a chain' as an independent coffee shop in the example below:

Where things get really interesting is the new access to apps or 'plugins' as they are called on ChatGPT. Plugins allow you to leverage ChatGPT's existing features alongside customised, specialist data and information on their own products and services.

This feature is clearly more suited to some tasks than others, so it's perhaps no surprise to see two travel companies, Kayak and Expedia, among the most popular so far.

The Kayak plugin is great for discovery. I was quite particular with my request (destination, budget, dates, must-haves) but it did a remarkable job of making clear suggestions and providing a detailed itinerary. I can see this being very useful as a sort of personal assistant, as you get the most value by expanding on your requests. It's certainly much faster than researching on your own.

I also tried the Instacart plugin. It was able to take my very picky dietary requirements and calorie guidelines and provide a detailed 3 day meal plan, recipes, ingredient lists and even pre-populate my on-site Instacart basket with the products I would need to make everything.

It's very early for both mass-use AI and for these kind of plugins, so while they are far from perfect, they do at least show where some brands are likely to go. There's already hundreds of plugins available and I suspect those who have already implemented them are pouring over the data to see if they have aided conversion rates or helped them reach new customers. If they have, I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of them.

If people start using AI services in place of traditional search, as we are already beginning to see, then many brands and established websites will need to move quickly to ensure they are represented in the results.

As always with new tech, I'd throughly recommend that you go and test these features out yourself. Hands-on experimentation is always the best way to learn!