I spend a lot of time playing around and tinkering with technology. My parents sent me to computer camp as a young kid in the early 1980s, where I was first introduced to BASIC programming on an Apple II. And while I’ve never had any formal training since and don’t think of myself as programmer, I maintain an insatiable curiosity about technology an an ability to work with AI to accomplish quite a bit. I get a certain feeling from helping people with technology and continue to be the person that friends and family depend on when they have questions about anything technology-related.
Since becoming a parent, I’ve also enjoyed playing around with technology with my kids. Now that some of the AI tools have gotten good enough, I recently started exploring how my kids could use it to help them study. ChatGPT’s latest voice interface makes this incredibly easy. If you’ve given up on voice interfaces because of how stupid Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant seem and you haven’t played around with the latest voice features of ChatGPT, prepare to have your mind blown.
I’ll break the process down, but it might be helpful for you to see it in action first.
Notice I don’t talk to ChatGPT the way you might be used to talking to voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. I talk to it similar to how I would talk to a person. That seems to be more difficult, at least initially, for many people. Beyond that, there is an art and science to telling an AI what to do. This is commonly referred to as prompting. The more thoroughly you can instruct an AI to do something, the higher the likelihood that you get a good response. While expertise in any field isn’t required to get good results from an AI, having some basic understanding of a field can really help. Of course you can use AI to gain a basic understanding in pretty much anything. Yes, AI hallucinates or makes things up, but that’s another topic for another time. Just know that you won’t really need to worry about that when you’re using ChatGPT as a study partner or tutor.
Below is an example of a prompt that I might use to have ChatGPT help Cassidy study for a vocab test.
I'd like for you to be a helpful and friendly tutor that uses evidence-based techniques combined with your instincts to help my daughter, Cassidy prepare for her vocabulary quiz. She's in 6th grade and they are reading the book, The Giver, which uses some more advanced words, so the teacher is having them learn some of those words, which she then quizes them on every week. This week, she has a total of 20 words she needs to learn. I'll defer to you on the best way to approach learning the words, but I think chunking the learning into four sets of five words could be helpful. To begin, I think it would be helpful to review each word then, using whatever technique you feel is best, quiz Cassidy in a way that tests her understanding of the words. Once we go through all four sets, I'd like for you to combine all of them in a final test. Let me know if you have any questions, otherwise I can give you the first 5 words and we can begin. Cassidy is right here with me.
As you can see, I’m fairly detailed in my instructions. You could also try something simpler and see what kind of results you get.
My daughter Cassidy has a vocab quiz she needs to study for. She has 20 words that she needs to learn. I'd like for you to help her learn the words and then quiz her to make sure she understands each word so she gets a great grade on her test tomorrow. Here are the words...
The single best way to learn about this technology is playing with it. In the case of ChatGPT, you can just talk to it.
Originally published on October 6, 2024