Introduction
I had been enjoying Google’s NotebookLM. It was fantastic at uploading a document at making one page summaries, podcasts, and answering questions. The tool has been positively disruptive in how quickly I get caught up to speed on new information.
The only thing it couldn’t do that I wanted was for it to take instructions and for it to be easily shareable without the need of Google accounts. That’s where a friend pointed me to try ChatGPT Plus.
What is the Plus version?
It’s about $20 a month subscription. You get access to all of the best models without limits and access to Sora – the video creator. The best part is the ability to create your own GPTs.
My TDOT GPT
I wanted to think of a small scale GPT that could interpret and give direction about the PDN process and TDOTs design guidelines. They are very close together and cite each other and I figured it would be pretty helpful for this tool to be able to make sense of over 1,000 pages without the usual suffering of cognitive overload on my part.
There was one more document that I wanted to integrate and that was the new Scope guide TDOT released. I found it very interesting and vital to the early stages of PDN. The only thing was that whenever I asked around for what others thought, they had no idea it existed.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not harping on these long guidelines. I download them on my Kindle and read them on my free time. But most don’t. And most would probably shove me in a locker if they knew that. So how could I help others know of these very important guides without them needing to know every square inch of them? I kept coming back to training a GPT so there I went.
Building the GPT
Uploading the documents was simple. I made sure they were named something with the month and year at the end just in case someone asked the tool to list out it’s documents. I toggled off options for it to search the internet, create spreadsheets and docs, uploading documents, making images, and the sort. I did not want this to be too robust.
The biggest part was making all the instructions. I used the newest model of Chat to help me. I did not want the model to try and calculate anything, nor give a web address, nor give someone’s name, or other things. This instruction list included directions for how to answer the user such as to use bullet points often, don’t repeat their question, be professional, and be concise.
Testing the GPT
The darn thing immediately started doing things I did not want! It tried calculating things, giving specs and dimensions, and showing web links. I quickly learned that you have to be incredibly crystal clear with how you word your instructions and even give examples to the model with how you want it to respond. Once again, Chat helped me with that.
I believe this is the part where custom GPTs are either really good or really bad. The instructions and testing are the most important part. There’s going to be an explosion of GPTs from people you see on the internet and half of them are just going to upload the documents and say they are done. Test those things and toss them out if they’re bad.
Conclusion
ChatGPT Plus was a game changer for me. This GPT I made has been fantastic for my professional use already. I anticipate a great boost to my learning speed as I move into more project management roles.
It is my hope that others try it out and see if it is a useful tool for them too.
