Now that Microsoft has unveiled their integration of OpenAI/chatGPT with Bing to create the new Bing Search/Chat experience, there is another big category that Microsoft is working on but it is not open to the public yet.
That is the integration of OpenAI/chatGPT to every other software category within the ecosystem. (Yusuf confirmed this during the event earlier this week).
One obvious category is the Microsoft Office 365 suite. I have no ideas what Microsoft is doing in this area, and I haven’t spoken to anyone at Microsoft or OpenAI, but I have some educated guesses/wishes based on what I have seen on the internet. In the remainder of this article, I will highlight certain use cases that should be included in the integration 🙂
1) “Talking” (more precisely chatting) to Excel/Spreadsheet application to get things done
I have to admit; while I love to be a spreadsheet ninja, I am not T.T
I can use Google Sheets/Excel to an immediate level, but I need to search a lot to know how to use many functions. Even after reading the examples, it still takes me a while to apply that understanding to the formula I am trying to write. So the idea that we can use human instruction to ask Excel to write formulas for us is brilliant! (to me, at least :P)
The fact that right now, using chatGPT, people can already ask chatGPT to write excel functions for them in normal language (see Kevin’s Youtube video) means that when OpenAI is being integrated natively into Excel:
- It should work even better because OpenAI should understand the content/context of the file, of the exact cells.
- We don’t need to interrupt the workflow by switching from Excel to chatGPT and then copy back the formula. All can be done right there within Excel.
I hope that this function will become available with Google Sheets soon too because I use Google Sheets more often. (If you do a few searches on Youtube, you can find many videos about people trying to “integrate” chatGPT API/functions into Google Sheets.)
2) Summarize Meeting content and create follow-up action items automatically
Look at this video from the MeeTime channel, where they demonstrated how to use chatGPT to summarize the meeting transcript. The gist of this is:
- For online meetings using Microsoft Team or Google Meet, or most Youtube video, the transcript can be automatically included live or after the meeting.
- Why don’t we then use chatGPT to summarize the meeting transcript to provide an executive summary?
- The video from MeeTime doesn’t talk about asking chatGPT to auto-generate follow-up action items and assign owners but I can’t imagine that to be too difficult.
So here is my ask when OpenAI/similar tech is natively integrated to Microsoft Teams:
- Auto-generate the executive summary of the meeting for us. Use the meeting attendants as a way to control the initial access level to avoid information being shared without proper permission
- Auto-create follow-up actions and assign an owner to each item based on the conversation in the meeting
- Create a soft calendar invite (or use a similar mechanism) to indicate the deadline for each task
- Etc…
This will be brilliant because it will save us a lot of time. The current workflow with ChatGPT is very cumbersome because:
- The character limit so you can’t enter the entire transcript into a single prompt and ask chatGPT to summarize. Try with any video that is 30 mins or 1 hour long, you know what I mean
- If you feed chatGPT one part of the transcript at a time because of the character limit, the summary/meaning of the summary could change significantly because chatGPT doesn’t “see” the entire picture.
Of course, the above can be applied to Google Meet or other platforms.
Make it happen for us, please 🙂brilliant developers
3) chatGPT + DALL E 2 to create the entire presentation
We already know that chatGPT is good with text and can create outlines and narratives based on the user’s command. DALL-E-2 or Stable Diffusion (dreamstudio) are great with images/videos.
It will be even better when chatGPT and DALL E 2 capabilities are combined into a single product so we can have the entire presentation (including pictures) created for us.
I have been using Stable Diffusion to create AI-generated pictures for a while now. But the challenge I am facing is to give the machine enough context so that it can tweak the picture to what I want. Also, the current free DreamStudio interface doesn’t allow for this iterative tweaking, similar to how I can ask chatGPT to tweak certain parts of the text content it generates.
So the ask is this:
- Integrate not just OpenAI but DALL E 2 (or any similar technologies for text and images) into Powerpoint or other presentation softwares.
- Allow the user to co-create the presentation with the machine, including both narratives, text, and supporting images
- Allow for the iterative editing process to happen via chat for each slide/image
I haven’t got the chance to try Google Bard yet, and I am not sure if Google is developing their version of DALL E 2 or Stable Diffusion so I can’t comment much here.
But I know the demand is there to help us with creating/editing presentations, not just among office workers but also with students, teachers, bankers, doctors, etc.…
4) chatGPT + DALL E to help us with the visualization of data
This use case is an extension of #3 but with a spreadsheet/excel graph function. Have you ever wondered how people can create beautiful, clean, easy-to-understand graphs from numbers but you are having a hard time?
Why not have chatGPT + DALL E 2 integration with Excel or Google Sheets (or any other spreadsheet program) to help? My educated guess is that not many people want to learn Python/R just because they need to create visualizations from a data set.
Why can’t we just “talk” or “chat” with the machine and ask the machine to create visualizations for us, using the raw data?
So the ask is:
- Integrate chatGPT and DALL E 2 into Excel
- Replace the current graph generation workflow to create a visualization with a chatGPT type of workflow/iteration
- That’s it 🙂
5) ChatGPT integration with Word/Outlook
This seems to be the most straightforward integration so I don’t want to say much here. We know what chatGPT can do so the ask is:
- Integrate it into Word or Outlook so that it understands the situational context and tone of voice automatically. So far, making the machine to sound like myself is my biggest hurdle.
- Allow users then prompt the machine to perform similar chatGPT functions within Word or Outlook but with the tone of voice of each person
Additional research online /using Youtube can show many other cool examples and applications that people have thought of so I will stop here. One thing for sure is that I am excited about what the future can bring. I look forward to trying these products when they come out and learning how to leverage the machine to its full potential.
All of the above examples are written using Microsoft 365 product suite as an example, but I don’t see why they can’t be done with other productivity product suites from Google or Zoom. I dont have visibility into what they are doing in this area, so I can’t comment.
6) Examples of integrating chatGPT into Google Sheets or Slides
Here are a few examples of how chatGPT can be integrated into Google Sheets or slides to do simple tasks. I imagine that the workflow will be a lot more intuitive when Bard is natively integrated into Google Sheets or Slides.
ChatGPT API in Google Sheets example
ChatGPT API in Google Slides example
7) Mar 16 Microsoft announcement about Copilot 365
After slightly more than one month since I wrote this article, Microsoft publically announced Copilot 365, which is basically the integration of OpenAI capabilities into the Microsoft office 365 suite. You can read more about it here. In the same article, I summarized the different risks that OpenAI is exploring regarding AI from their technical paper on GPT 4.
Last but not least, while I dont talk about revenue potential from the above integration, I am sure end-user delight and stickiness will mean less churn and better lifetime value.
Let me know what you think via the comments below.
Chandler
One comment