F2F #33: FamilyGPT

Since we've got a long weekend ahead of us, with Easter and such, I figured I'd write something more casual and less work-like for an easier read.

I will be sharing a quick list of ten uses of ChatGPT (and AI in general) to help me run my household.

I’ve been playing with ChatGPT not just as a tool, but as a daily companion. Not in a weird “HER” way but like a really smart intern who doesn’t sleep and never asks for equity. It is still a long ways from becoming a personal assistant (I'm trying to get there but it loses too much context far too often), but it still helps me get a lot of shit done.

Here are 10 real ways I use it in my day-to-day:

1. Extract text from images: I know you can do this with Mac, but the experience is sometimes pretty bad. ChatGPT gives it with proper formatting, and it can output it with the formatting of your choice, like Markdown.
2. Grocery list: I throw in our meal plan (pdf) and dietary constraints (we're following a diet at home, right now) and it generates the long list of ingredients, so I know exactly what do I need to buy and how much of it.
3. Alternative ingredients: Following up on the above, sometimes I find myself cooking and one ingredient is missing. I ask it for a viable alternative with the other ingredients I have and it gives me very creative ways to complete the recipe (most of the times, healthier)!
4. Grammar & spelling corrections: I give it my blog posts and newsletter drafts and tell it to give me everything that needs to be fixed both for typos, errors and style tweaks but I specifically forbid it to rewrite it for me. Just list the fixes, explain why, and then I go change the things manually, so I can learn.
5. Bedtime stories for the kid: We've been using ChatGPT for two years now to give us a new chapter every night of a story with his favourite characters and the morale of our choosing. Works like a charm.
6. Summarising long docs & articles: Saves me hours. Just paste the info and ask for key takeaways or bullet points and ask it to explain it in your favourite style.
7. Help me fix stuff: Upload a photo of what's broken in your home and have it come up with solutions, ordered by cost and difficulty. Works like a charm.
8. Gaming guides: Instead of googling stuff, now I ask Perplexity to help me get through my favourite games. It generates the text version so I don't have to watch videos of folks rambling on for hours only to find out that they don't actually share the solution that I need.
9. Learning new stuff: From tech trends to parenting tips or Greek phrases, I treat it like a micro-Wikipedia that talks back. My good friend Marc Collado says "it's like being able to speak to the smartest person in the universe". I've recently learnt about topoconductors, audio processing on LLMs and the differences between all the models that ChatGPT uses, for instance.
10. Memory from books & movies: When I want to read the second part of a book, or watch a new season of a serie, and I don't remember what happened earlier on, I ask ChatGPT to fill me in with the details so I don't have to go back to read/watch to catch up.

Bonus: I also use it now to generate memes:

😬