After months of considering the number of possibilities of enhancing the work we do for clients with the vast number AI tools available I started to think, what could these tools do for me?
Starting with some more fun- make me an artist examples, like writing me my first great novel or maybe I could design a cool piece of art for my empty wall, I thought more about what I could do if I had a personal assistant to do all the things, I have no time for but manage to squeeze in each week. Pain point #1, grocery shopping.
Truthfully, I love saving recipes. From a dedicated Pinterest board, appropriately named “Foods I Wish I Could Make” to a backlog of saved recipes on Instagram, to a stack of aspirational cookbooks lined in up in my kitchen, I had the meal ideas, just not the patience to go through all of them, let alone shop for each ingredient.
Back to that personal assistant idea. I thought, could GPT work for me?
Jumping into to ChatGPTs newer feature GPT Builder I started super basic in my prompting. The nice element is that it works much like a chatbot guiding you along with specific requests to help create a GPT most aligned to your needs.
Like prompts with ChatGPT, specificity is important to get to a closer level of personalization you that is focused on your needs. My initial goal was to create a basic GPT that could review provided recipes and create a shopping list that I could use on Instacart.
The initial creation prompts are simple and straight forward. Provide a goal of what you are looking to create.
As I started to refine my prompts to get closer to a dinner meal prep helper, I worked through different ways to use existing recipes that I had saved.
An ideal example would be to look at my saved Pinterest board, but I wanted to see how it would review a single recipe as a starting exercise. An immediate limitation is including recipes that were behind paywalls. One interesting learning was that the GPT did recognize the title of the recipe and was able to recommend what it thought would be needed to create that recipe
I decided to try to copy and paste a simple recipe that was available through an open site, All Recipes. The response was better, as it was able to read simple text and determine what was needed. This detail is normally available on most recipe blogs or sites so the ultimate goal would be for it to review the full page.
As a further build I asked it to consider the ingredient list to make this recipe for two people.
These results were helpful and made me consider including that as part of the specific configuration for me.
While I am just starting my GPT assistant journey I can see how further trial and error would help me develop the best way to reach my intended outcome. Although this is just a starter version, I plan to continue iterating to make the best GPT for me. I would love for the GPT to support reviewing recipes I have saved and create a full shopping list based on several recipes and personalization I have such as ingredient replacement or substitutions. In the meantime, here’s to another week of chicken dinners.
Allison Pearce
