Here’s a tie. Both the Expedia and the KAYAK transportation and hotel plugins are quite good. Both deliver human-like responses to simple questions: “What’s the best three-star hotel rate in mid-town Manhattan between July 10th and 14th?” They also do well with more open-ended, subtle questions such as “What’re the most fun things to do in Chicago in the summer with my eight-year-old between August 1st and 3rd?” Neither listed the Cubs games at Wrigley Field — Bad AI, Bad! — but both suggested reasonable kid-friendly activities.

However, you do need to look carefully at their results. For example, KAYAK, when I asked for city-center Munich hotels under 300 Euros, the top two answers were well above my price point. 

Used with caution, both are useful. Unfortunately, you can’t use them together to fine-tune the answers you need for your next business trip. Still, since travel agents are as rare as hen’s teeth these days, it’s well worth using them. 

A lot of valuable information is stored in PDF files. The problem is pulling the answers from them, as PDF is not a researcher-friendly format. Numerous plugins can work with PDFs, but Ask Your PDF is the best. 

This plugin does just what the name says. It reads through a PDF to find the answers to your questions. This can be very helpful. However, unlike the other best plugins, you need to work outside ChatGPT before it works. Here’s how to do it:

Manually upload the PDF to the AskYourPDF service with these steps:

1. Go to AskYourPDF Upload Page.

2. Click on the “Upload Document” button.

3. Select the PDF file you want to upload from your device.

4. Once the upload is complete, you will receive a document ID (doc_id).

You paste the doc_id into your ChatGPT query and use it to extract information from the PDF with the plugin.

It takes a bit of work, but the results are excellent. Unlike most ChatGPT and plugins, it gives you exactly where the information comes from within the document. If you work a lot with PDFs, or even if you only do it once in a blue moon, this is one handy utility. 

Since you can’t use Bing search with plugins — darn it! — the next best thing is Link Reader. It also does just what the name says: It lets you pull up information for a specific page. 

But, you can also use it for more general topics. So, for example, the query: “I want to catch up on the latest news concerning Ukraine, can you compile a list of articles for me to read? LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/us” will deliver you news from The Guardian and other news sites. 

You can also use it to hunt down recent gardening stories, the latest baseball news, and on and on. In addition, it can dig through PDF, PPT, image, Word, and other documents for the information you’re seeking. 

It also works well with other plugins, which makes it even more useful.

Hungry? Don’t cook? Let the OpenTable plugin help. With it you can ask questions, just as if you had an expert local foodie friend, and get good answers.

Alas, good isn’t always perfect. For example, when I asked it about Indian restaurants in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, it gave me a decent list, but it somehow missed the 2022 James Beard Award winner for Outstanding Restaurant Chai Pan. Whoops! Still, it gives you a start for making a reservation for tonight’s dinner. 

And if you want to cook a meal yourself, there’s always Instacart. With this plugin, you can create a “shoppable” list of the ingredients to make a perfect meal. Since my cooking abilities begin and end with boiling water for in the box mac and cheese, I leave it to you to decide how well it does. 

Asking the right question is most of the battle for getting good results from ChatGPT. It’s not that easy. But with Prompt Perfect, you don’t need to be an AI Prompt Engineer — yes, that’s a real job title these days — to get better answers. 

Just start your query with “Perfect,” jot down the rest of it, and Prompt Perfect will take it from there. Of course, the better you can craft your queries, the better job Prompt Perfect can do for you. 

You may have noticed that I keep harping on how you can’t trust ChatGPT, or any of its rivals, for accurate answers. That’s because you can’t. The AI chatbots give you what sounds like the right answer. That does not mean it is the right answer. 

You can use the WolframAlpha expert systems to get the correct answers to math problems and many other questions. Long before AI was anything except science fiction to the public, WolframAlpha was delivering accurate information to its customers. Indeed, accuracy is the name of its game. 

Together you can get the benefits of both. Now, it’s not good for everything. Technical, medical questions: Yes. What do I do about the flu? Not so much. Stay home, sleep a lot, and eat lots of chicken soup. 

But for those areas, such as math, physics, and finance, where it’s good, it’s very, very good indeed. 

If you’ve been digging into AI, you’ll have found out there’s a lot more than ChatGPT out there. Finding just the right AI program can be a major pain. Fortunately, for that problem, we have the self-explanatory There’s an AI for That plugin.

And, if your company is all excited about using it to replace you, remind them that according to this plugin, there’ are at least ten AI programs out there that can help put your CEO out on the unemployment line.  

Seriously, it’s a very useful program if you’re getting deep into the AI weeds. 

Some people use Microsoft Office programs. Me? I use the Google family and Slack for a lot of my work. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could organize it so that ChatGPT could, for example, pull out my schedule for the coming week from Google Calendar and then e-mail it to my co-workers via Gmail, and message my fellow Slackers with it on Monday morning? Thanks to the Zapier plugin, I can do exactly that. 

Getting everything just right to pull these operations off can be tedious, but the Zapier plugin will help you work out the details. Once it’s done, you can use it from now until retirement.

It’s a nice trick, which you can use for much more advanced workflow processing. If you want to cut out a lot of busy work, give it a try. You’ll be glad you did.