Do your job smarter with generative AI (no experience or credit card needed!)

I am a senior developer advocate at Google, and I want to share my tips on how anyone can use generative AI to do their job smarter.

My friend recently made a video about how to simply describe your office job. I do email, code, slides, docs, meetings. So regardless of what your office job is, you probably do some of these things.

After a few months of using generative AI chatbots to help with my job, I wanted to document techniques for people who might have heard about the tools but don’t know where to get started or use them to get the best results.

Getting started

I use a mix of Bard by Google and ChatGPT by OpenAI. Currently, these are free to use, so just make an account and you can start chatting or asking questions.

Generative chat tools: Bard (left) and ChatGPT (right)

My tips

Smaller questions get better results

You can ask chatbots to write a whole document, email, or slide notes for you, but they can end up being generic and difficult to refine. I like to start by asking for an outline and then providing specific details for each section. This approach tailors the content to my needs.

The bullets to paragraph pipeline

I love using bullet points to outline documents, blogs, and slide notes, but sometimes you need the information in a more formal format. Chatbots are great at converting bullet points to paragraphs, which gives me more freedom to focus on my ideas and get them out without getting stuck on the formalizing and editing.

Using Bard to convert bullets into a paragraph

Ask for edits

Chatbots are not just for generating text from scratch. They can also be used to edit and improve existing text. You can ask them to fix grammar and spelling errors of course, but you can also get creative and ask them to change the tone of the text (formal, casual, less serious), or even give it a sentence limit to get your point across briefly.

Butter it up

AI cannot “feel” anything (yet at least), but some compliments will actually help improve your responses. I will often say something like “You are a brilliant senior-level technical communicator and need to explain X topic to a non-technical person in a simple voice”. This guidance helps the AI to reframe the answer and make sure it is more knowledgeable.

Using ChatGPT to explain a concept using some compliments

Whether AI does a hostile world takeover or not, I’m not taking the risk of being a target, so I try to use “please” and “thank you” when chatting too — though I’m not sure if they do much…

Condense and expand

Writing a document or email for work can be challenging to get all the information into a clear format or making sure you’re covering all the topics. If I’m feeling wordy, I’ll write out (or even dictate) a long email just to get all the thoughts out and then can use the chatbot to summarize it and just include the key points.

On the other hand, if I can only manage to get a few words out, I’ll ask the chatbot to “fill in the rest of my email”. This can often help me to get the inspiration I need to actually write the email.

Compare and contrast

These chatbots know a LOT, so I like to use them to help me learn new things by comparing and contrasting ideas, concepts, or products. This can help me get up to speed quickly on a new topic in an area I’m already familiar with.

Using Bard to compare and contrast

Make a table!

I have a hard time processing large blocks of text, so one of my favorite things to do is have the chatbot format the result into a table for me.

Using Bard to compare and contrast using a table

With some tables I make, I’ll also ask for columns for specific information or do a task like create a summary column.

Double-check it all

These tools do some incredible things, but they can make some incredibly strange mistakes too. Reread anything you have AI write or edit to make sure it hasn’t gone off the rails. Any facts or references should be double-checked too as these chatbots are known to hallucinate and create falsities.

Take aways

I put this whole blog into the chatbots for some edits and am pretty happy with how it turned out. I’ve used the chatbots for editing slide notes, generating code and crafting emails. These are tools that will completely disrupt industries and if you can learn how to use them wisely you will be able to reap the benefits.

Comment if you have any requests for more tips on using these tools or if you have any of your own tricks that work for you!