Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. Features

ChatGPT is great, but it really needs these 4 new features

Luke Larsen
By

I know, it’s dumb to complain about a free service, which ChatGPT always has been. It feels especially silly for a technology that feels this new and exciting.

ChatGPT remains the best free AI chatbot out there — and yet, having used some of its rivals, coming back to ChatGPT can feel like a bare-bones experience. Here are five simple features that could really expand the usability of ChatGPT. Some of these would also make great additions to ChatGPT Plus, if the new features need to go there first.

Recommended Videos

A drafts option

Viewing different drafts in Google Bard.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

One of the neatest features of Google Bard is how it creates responses as drafts. It provides a single answer to your prompt, but then will also give you the option to see other versions or “drafts” of this same text. I’ve found this really useful. We all know that these AI chatbots always answer prompts in different ways, and being able to see variations on the response is so much more helpful than having to ask ChatGPT to “try that again.”

Related

It’s commonplace in text-to-image generation to let the AI produce many, many options to choose from to home in on the desired image. I’d love to see a version of that for ChatGPT someday.

Continued conversations

It’s not talked about much, but ChatGPT does have a limit to how many chats can be in a conversation. It’s very large, but I know that I’ve run up against it before. I understand why ChatGPT needs to put limits on stuff like this, but it’s frustrating that there’s no way to continue the conversation in a new chat. This is especially true because of the way ChatGPT stacks chats into separate conversations rather than into one continuous stream.

ChatGPT seems to be able to learn from and use the context of responses and prompts in a single conversation to continue the train of thought. If there must be limits of conversations, it’d at least be nice to be able to continue the context of that conversation in a new chat.

Different modes and styles

The three conversation styles available in Bing Chat.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The idea for this one is borrowed from Bing Chat. Microsoft’s own ChatGPT competitor is based on OpenAI’s technology, but offers some helpful ways of narrowing down the scope of a prompt. For example, Bing Chat let’s you choose from three different conversation styles: Creative, Balanced, and Precise. This tells Bing Chat how rigorous to be with knowledge and creativity. There’s also a “Compose” mode found in the Bing Chat Edge Copilot, which lets you choose from a number of different formats of writing and response lengths.

A lot of this can be achieved by using longer, more specific prompts that ask ChatGPT to respond in certain ways. But for beginners, these types of modes and limiters could make ChatGPT much easier to use. Having a slider for creative or precise modes could also adjust expectations about what kind of answers ChatGPT provides.

Suggested prompts

A screenshot of suggested prompts in Bing Chat.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Suggested prompts are available in all sorts of different AI chatbots, most notably with Bing Chat. Like having different modes and styles, suggested follow-up prompts are really helpful for beginners who might not know how to continue the conversation with ChatGPT.

But even for more advanced users, I think suggested prompts could help expand your mind for what kinds of things ChatGPT can do to extend the conversation or get something closer to your desired result.

Voice prompts

There are ways to interact with ChatGPT using voice via plug-ins, but I’d love for OpenAI to incorporate voice as a standard feature. It would be great to be able to provide prompts over voice or receive answers read aloud. Obviously, if you’re using ChatGPT for coding, this would be silly, but having ChatGPT function a bit more like a voice assistant would be awesome in most other situations.

All the hardware capabilities currently exist in the devices using ChatGPT, so I’m not sure even how difficult this would be. It’d likely freak people out even more, but voice prompts could really help bring ChatGPT to life.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Luke Larsen
Luke Larsen
Senior Editor, Computing
Luke Larsen is the Senior editor of computing, managing all content covering laptops, monitors, PC hardware, Macs, and more.
‘Take this as a threat’ — Copilot is getting unhinged again
A screenshot of Copilot's unhinged responses on a screen.

The AI bots are going nuts again. Microsoft Copilot -- a rebranded version of Bing Chat -- is getting stuck in some old ways by providing strange, uncanny, and sometimes downright unsettling responses. And it all has to do with emojis.

A post on the ChatGPT subreddit is currently making the rounds with a specific prompt about emojis. The post itself, as well as the hundreds of comments below, show different variations of Copilot providing unhinged responses to the prompt. I assumed they were fake -- it wouldn't be the first time we've seen similar photos -- so imagine my surprise when the prompt produced similarly unsettling responses for me.

Read more
ChatGPT shortly devolved into an AI mess
A response from ChatGPT on an Android phone.

I've seen my fair share of unhinged AI responses -- not the least of which was when Bing Chat told me it wanted to be human last year -- but ChatGPT has stayed mostly sane since it was first introduced. That's changing, as users are flooding social media with unhinged, nonsensical responses coming from the chatbot.

In a lot of reports, ChatGPT simply spits out gibberish. For example, u/Bullroarer_Took took to the ChatGPT subreddit to showcase a response in which a series of jargon and proper sentence structure gives the appearance of a response, but a close read shows the AI spitting out nonsense.

Read more
OpenAI’s new AI-made videos are blowing people’s minds
An AI image portraying two mammoths that walk through snow, with mountains and a forest in the background.

OpenAI's latest venture into AI might be its most impressive one to date. Dubbed "Sora," this new text-to-video AI model has just opened its doors to a limited number of users who will get to test it. The company launched it by showing several videos made entirely by AI, and the end results are shockingly realistic.

OpenAI introduces Sora by saying that it can create realistic scenes based on text prompts, and the videos shared on its website serve to prove it. The prompts are descriptive, but short; I've personally used longer prompts just interacting with ChatGPT. For instance, to generate the video of wooly mammoths pictured above, Sora required a 67-word prompt that described the animals, the surroundings, and the camera placement.

Read more