ChatGPT has a suite of features that lets users do a lot more than just ask simple questions about every facet of their life.
Accessing the chatbot’s Library keeps track of all the images and documents you’ve uploaded while being able to ask questions about them and even get summaries. The Projects feature lets you easily organize and reference your chats, files and tools all in one place. And the Plugins page is home to a wide range of apps that can be installed in ChatGPT and become part of your conversations as you send your prompts to them directly for any relevant requests (such as asking the Target Plugin to find you the best prices for back-to-school items).
Another helpful feature that is not part of ChatGPT is something called Skills, which OpenAI defines as “reusable, shareable workflows that tell ChatGPT how to do a specific task so ChatGPT can do that task more consistently.” These Skills can be instructions, examples and code that can be called upon during future chats. And if you have a ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Healthcare and Education account, you can take advantage of this latest tool.
Here’s how to activate ChatGPT Skills and 7 prompts you can use to try it out for yourself.
Activating ChatGPT Skills and putting these prompts to good use to test it out
Accessing the Skills page is as easy as opening your ChatGPT sidebar, selecting Plugins and selecting the Skills tab at the top of the screen (it’s right next to the Plugins tab). Once you’ve gotten into the Skills page, you’ll see any of the Skills that you’ve already installed and created, plus the ones that were shared with you and the ones you’ve shared with everyone in your workspace.
You can create Skills one of two ways: through a direct chat or with an editing tool. Simply click on the “+” sign next to the “Search skills” search bar to select the “Create with chat” or “Create with Editor” option.
For my initial experiment with the Skills feature, I felt like the Create with chat option worked best. To kick things off, I came up with a simple prompt that tells ChatGPT to recommend waterfall hikes based on my current location. The prompt I used to start building my first Skill is as follows: “Recommend three hiking trails for someone who wants waterfalls, moderate difficulty, and a hike under four hours.”
From that point forward, ChatGPT helped me refine it by adding the following qualifiers:
- Find three waterfall hikes within 25 miles
- Favor moderate routes under four hours
- Check live closures, conditions, access rules, and seasonal flow
- Expand to 50 or 100 miles if necessary
- Compare options and identify the best overall pick
This conversational Skills creation process resulted in my first skill (titled “recommend-waterfall-hikes”) getting built into the following prompt:
“Recommend nearby waterfall hikes using the user's current or supplied location, preferences, and live web research. Use when a user wants three local hikes featuring waterfalls, especially moderate routes that can be completed in under four hours, or asks for waterfall trail ideas filtered by difficulty, duration, distance, access, closures, or current conditions.”
Feel free to try out the following seven starter prompts with the Skills feature to see how the Create with chat option transforms them into something more specific to your tastes (it’s also worth mentioning that Plugins can directly connect to Skills for specified chats and workflows):
- Plan an outdoor weekend where every activity is within 30 minutes of each other.
- Find experiences most tourists miss.
- Build an itinerary that minimizes driving.
- Find three concerts that would make memorable experiences.
- Compare these three concerts based on ticket value and venue quality.
- Find hidden-gem restaurants.
- Plan a date night around a Broadway show that ends before 10:30 p.m.
Bottom line
ChatGPT Skills is built to generate repeatable prompts for users who want personalized recommendations, planning options that take their constraints into account, educational workflow commands for them & their group and more.
Approaching your first Skills creation with this structure could aid in all three cases: “Help me achieve [goal] while staying within [constraints]. Prioritize [what matters most]. Explain why each recommendation fits me and suggest one option I probably wouldn’t have found out on my own.”
Feel free to tinker with Skills to see the sort of polished prompts it creates for the tasks you want them to tackle.
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