IMPORTANT: Updated as of May 19th 2023. We keep updating this resource as more developments come up.
The latest update includes the transition of the plugins from Alpha to Beta, as well as how to access, activate and use them.
ChatGPT is one of the hottest products in the world of Artificial Intelligence, and its momentum seems to be growing consistently.
New additions are being implemented at lightning speed, and the ecosystem is quickly building up. From developers to volunteer ambassadors, all that a product needs to grow organically is working for ChatGPT.
One of the latest additions is opening up to plugins. Yes, ChatGPT has opened its doors to plugins. While not fully open to everyone, some popular platforms in the web have already been given the greenlight to build their plugins on top of ChatGPT. OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company, has also posted its own plugins and we’ll also include these in our tracking of the plugins currently available for ChatGPT.
Let’s have a look at them.
Third party ChatGPT plugins
These are plugins that have been developed by companies to help their customers take advantage of ChatGPT capabilities.
1. Expedia
Expedia members can now engage in AI-powered helpful conversions and get trip recommendations thanks to the power of ChatGPT. Customers are able to see important items such as amenities, reasons to visit a particular place, flight details including prices, and discounts.
It also means that you can ask for recommendations that suit your budget and preferences. Announcing the plugin, Expedia said that the “new trip planning experience brings in intelligent shopping by automatically saving hotels discussed in the conversation to a “trip” in the app”.
When you are ready to book, you go straight to Expedia. Expedia members can also use another version of the ChatGPT plugin that is hosted inside the Expedia app. So whether you are on ChatGPT or in the expedia app, you’ll still get the full benefits of Artificial Intelligence.
2. FiscalNote
The FiscalNote ChatGPT plugin allows users to access top-tier, up-to-date collections of data and information related to legal, political, and regulatory matters.
3. Instacart
With the Instacart ChatGPT plugin, users can easily plan meals and recipes by identifying necessary ingredients, taking into consideration any dietary limitations or ingredients already available at home. The plugin creates a shopping list in real-time, and allows users to order the required ingredients for delivery, so they can promptly begin cooking.
4. KAYAK
The KAYAK ChatGPT plugin assists users in searching for flights, accommodations, and rental cars. Moreover, it provides suggestions for destinations that fall within the user’s budget.
Announcing the plugin in a press release, KAYAK said that “ChatGPT will act as a virtual travel assistant, allowing for more conversational interactions with KAYAK’s search engine. Users can head to ChatGPT and ask it questions in the same way they would ask a human.”
For example, if you want to find a place where you can fly to and fro for only $200, you simply head over to the KAYAK ChatGPT plugin and put the question there. You’ll then get the most suitable options, and make clarifications.
5. Klarna Shopping
The Klarna Shopping ChatGPT plugin offers personalized product recommendations to users seeking shopping guidance and inspiration. The plugin includes links that enable users to shop for recommended products via Klarna’s search and comparison tool.
So when you are not sure of what to buy, for example, you just head over to ChatGPT, find the Klarna plugin and ask for advice. Not being sure of what to buy is a common challenge among many people, especially when faced with situations like when you need to buy gifts, prizes and such. For example, let’s say you are planning to attend a birthday of a long time friend that you have not seen for a long time, what gift will you buy them? This advice will be readily provided by the plugin, thanks to the immense historical data that Klarna already has.
6. Milo Family AI
The Milo Family AI ChatGPT plugin helps parents to organize their daily tasks at home. For example, you can ask it to get you a list of all tasks that you may not have completed today.
7. OpenTable
OpenTable is known for online restaurant reservation solutions, and their ChatGPT plugin makes things even easier for its users. With a simple prompt via the plugin, you can get restaurant recommendations.
According to OpenTable, you can ask questions such as “I have a date I want to impress. What’s a restaurant with oysters and great cocktails in the Upper West Side NY?” ChatGPT will then give the best recommendations, of course based on the data of restaurants available with OpeTable.
8. Shop
An interesting one, isn’t it? With a simple prompt via ChatGPT, you can search for millions of products from the leading brands around the world.
9. Speak
All of us, (or is it most of us? ) would love to be able to speak something in another language – even if it’s a simple one word greeting. What if you could learn to speak something, say for example, common words like greetings in another language quickly. Well, just head over to ChatGPT Plus, land on the Speak ChatGPT plugin and ask it to teach you how to say whatever is it you want in whatever language that is supported in Speak.
Of course, Speak is the AI tutor app that enables one to practice conversations in another language without requiring a tutor. And now with the plugin, users will be able to access Speak-powered tutoring directly from ChatGPT.
10. Wolfram
The Wolfram ChatGPT plugin allows ChatGPT to access the resourceful data of Wolfram’s computational knowledge in real-time and share it with users through natural conversations. It can visualize data and even write code.
11. Zapier
Zapier is the giant app platform that allows both individuals and companies to connect to all the apps they use from one platform. Now with the Zapier ChatGPT plugin, you can go over to ChatGPT, proceed to the Zapier plugin , pull your apps to the ChatGPT interface and get working -right from within ChatGPT. Amazing!
OpenAI ChatGPT plugins
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is also hosting its own plugins for ChatGPT.
So far they have rolled out a web browser and a code interpreter. They have also rolled out an open source knowledge base retrieval plugin which any developer is free to self host.
Let’s have a glance at these ChatGPT plugins by OpenAI:
1. Web Browser
So here is the thing: The ChatGPT web browser plugin uses the Bing search API to search answers directly from the live internet, based on what the user has asked.
In other words, it’ll be able to do the browsing for you! Yes, you heard that right. Simply go to the plugin, describe what you want it to browse, and let the magic happen. It’ll look around and get you the most valuable information.
Previously, if you asked ChatGPT to get you current information,it would politely explain that it’s trained on data that runs up to 2021 only. But with this plugin, this barrier disappears.
What is most exciting about this capability is that the browser displays its journey as it performs the browsing. It shows you which website it’s getting the information from (including the link), then summarizes your answer and presents it in a simple version. What’s more, you can ask it to do anything with the answer, e.g use it to compose a song or write an article, or use it to create FAQs. The potential is only limited by your imagination.
It’ll be interesting to see how OpenAI shapes this plugin, as browsing the web is quite an intricate process. Wil such a tool be able to find accurate or fairly reasonable information from a dataset that it has not been trained on? Will it be biased towards established information sources at the expense of smaller players whose information may nonetheless be more valuable e in certain respects? These are some of the concerns that OpenAI will have to grapple with.
2. Code interpreter
This ChatGPT plugin uses python to interpret code, handle upload and downloads. It can also perform logic calculations, such as this prompt that OpenAI used to demonstrate what the plugin can do in logic calculations:
“a brick weighs 30% of a brick plus five GPUs there are 100 bricks and 200 GPUs in a metric ton how much does a brick weigh? ”
Some of the areas that OpenAI has identified for potential use cases of the code interpreter plugin include;
- Solving math problems, both quantitative and qualitative
- Data analysis and visualization
- Converting files between formats
The ultimate goal of this plugin is to open programming capabilities to a new audience. So for example, you might be an enthusiastic entrepreneur with lots of ideas you would like to implement but those ideas require some basic programming that you are not able to do. Imagine having a junior programmer helping you do that code. All you need to do is issue your prompts, and your assistant, in this case the code interpreter, does the rest.
3. Knowledge base retrieval plugin
As we mentioned earlier, this ChatGPT retrieval plugin is open source. It enables semantic search plus retrieval of personal or organizational information.
As this plugin is open source, it means that developers have the freedom to deploy their own version of the plugin, then feed it with content, from which it’ll be easy to retrieve different types of information.
Beta roll out of plugins announced
Previously, the plugins approved on ChatGPT were in Alpha mode within ChatGPT Plus – meaning they were only accessible to a select number of people to use and offer feedback before they can move to beta or fully mainstream.
Then on May 12th 2023, OpenAI announced that it was starting to roll out web browsing and plugins in beta mode to users already using the Plus plan.
How to activate the web browser feature and third party plugins in ChatGPT:
1. Go to https://chat.openai.com/
2. Click on the three dots next to your profile name Name. Your profile name is found at the bottom left corner
3. Click ‘Settings’. This will take you to a window that looks like this:
4. Click on “Beta features”. This will bring a window that looks like this:
5. Toggle/ turn on any feature that you want to try.You can turn on both “web browsing ” and “Plugins”
Here is what you end up with:
How the plugins and browsing feature work
Interestingly, both the plugins and the web browsing feature are not available as options where you will pick when to use and click on them as you engage with ChatGPT in chats.
Instead, ChatGPT itself will intelligently decide when to call the browsing feature or a certain plugin to offer help depending on the type of question you ask.
For example, “the model may decide that a question about current events requires calling the browser feature”.
But you can still nudge ChatGPT to use a plugin of your choice to provide answers to some of your questions. For example, you can ask it to plan your next trip using the Expedia plugin.
We’ll always keep this information updated to reflect the latest developments.
