Creating an AI assistant with ChatGPT

This week's AI experiment is creating a personal assistant. My first one is intended as a general-purpose assistant for personal projects and "life". I named it Andy (First assistant of the series and I wanted an "A" name). I wasn’t completely sure what I would have Andy do, but I thought it might be interesting to see if I could make an assistant that was useful for those little life tasks like organizing my week, planning a house project or trip, that sort of thing.

I should say, up front, that I have a paid ChatGPT Plus account. I'm going to be doing a deeper dive soon on the privacy implications of various LLMs (watch this space!) but generally the paid accounts are going to have better privacy policies than the free accounts. ("If you didn't pay for the product then you are the product.")

In ChatGPT I went to GPTs and at the top right I selected Create. There ChatGPT walked me through the initial creation where I told the assistant what I wanted it to do. This is a simple starter, and I’ll undoubtedly refine and expand it as I use the assistant and want to tweak it.

"You will answer questions and help me plan and brainstorm things in my personal life. You'll cover a broad range of topics loosely organized around my personal life, projects, family, and hobbies. Keep your tone warm and friendly, but never silly. Ask follow-up questions if more information will better help you address a topic. Accuracy is very important. Cite your sources if there are sources to cite."

Next, I wanted Andy to have some foundational info about me that it could refer to. So I created a blank new Word document called "About Ben" and I typed in 2-3 pages of loose info about me (age, occupation, interests, health and fitness, family, etc.) that I thought would be helpful for Andy to refer to as we work together.

One big consideration was just how deep I wanted to go; how much I wanted to share with Andy. I did give Andy some basic information about my finances, for example, but no deep details or account numbers. Andy doesn't need to know my social security number, but I did give it my birthdate. It doesn’t need to know my exact bank balance, but I told it approximately how much I owe on my house and roughly what my annual income is. If you take this approach, deciding how much you’re comfortable sharing is one of the most important decisions you can make. I chose to approach it as “If I was hiring a human assistant, what would I want them to know about me to do the best possible job assisting me?”

I uploaded that document into Andy and I'll update it as I want to add or change information.

Here are a couple of things I've used Andy for already.

• Car maintenance question - My wife and I were wondering we should be thinking about rotating the tires on our vehicles. So I asked Andy "What's the best time to rotate the tires on our cars?" Since my About document includes the year, make, and model of our cars Andy was able to come back and give specific advice for the interval at which each car should get tires rotated.

• Answering a product question - I was at Fred Meyer and I saw a USB charger for sale. I need one for my Surface Pro but the box didn't give any indication of the wattage output. I opened ChatGPT on my phone and asked Andy "What's the wattage output for this charger?" And I added a photo that I took of the box. Andy looked it up and told me what the advertised output was (Sadly, too low).

• Book recommendations – I’ve told Andy which books I’ve read recently and what I’m reading now. I asked it to recommend what I should read next. Impressively the first book it suggested was something I already have on my “To Read” pile. I think I’ll bump that one to the top.

Andy’s answers have been generally pretty good, though not always perfect. And to its credit it DOES ask good follow-up questions pretty often to get additional useful context.

One thing I'm interested in having Andy help with is our family's house hunt. We're moving next year and doing some exploratory house hunting to figure out what area we might want to move to. I created a second Word document for that project and I typed in 2-3 pages of notes about what we must have in our new house, what we need in the new neighborhood, various parameters (number of bedrooms, budget, etc) and then I uploaded that document to Andy too.

I've already had some interesting conversations with Andy about the house hunt, and I'll share more details about that soon, because it bears it’s own post.

I’m also interested in seeing how Andy can be useful helping me plan and organize trips. So I created a third Word document called travel preferences where I typed a page or two of info about my preferences for airlines, airline seating, flight times, hotels, rental cars, etc. I haven’t had a chance to use it for that yet, but it’ll be interesting to see just how effective Andy is for trip planning.

I've been giving Andy background info and context about me via Word documents, but I thought it might be helpful if it could read my various social media accounts such as LinkedIn or Bluesky. ChatGPT doesn't offer a way for me to give it a set of URLs to refer to so I thought I'd try putting them in an Excel file and uploading that Excel file alongside the Word documents I created. Unfortunately, ChatGPT has limited ability to access social media URLs that way so, so far at least, that effort hasn't worked.

I’m still interested in the idea of creating a ledger of things in Excel and providing that to Andy, but I’m not sure what that use case is quite yet. Perhaps a list of houses we’re interested in. Perhaps a more formal list of books I’ve read so that it can make better recommendations going forward.

My mother always kept my medical history in an Excel sheet (she was a cancer researcher, so that sort of thing was her jam) and I’ve considered reviving that and maybe providing it to Andy…but my medical history isn’t that interesting and I don’t have any significant medical issues I need Andy’s help with.

So I’m still looking for ideas to try.

Shortly I’ll have a post detailing how Andy is helping with our house hunt. It’s pretty interesting and I’ve had enough conversations with it that I can go pretty deep on that example.