2023-04-10 Reading with ChatGPT

#ChatGPT #AI #Productivity

Let ChatGPT summarize webpages in the browser

I'd bet you have quite some trouble, too, to keep up with the news, right? For a couple of years I've happily been using Pocket to collect stuff I wanted to read. That works nicely - you can collect interesting looking articles with the click of a button e.g. from the Save to Pocket Chrome Extension, and then read it later on the tablet with the Pocket App, even offline. Perfect right? Weeelll, not quite - if I only had the time to read half that stuff I collect there... I think there must be several thousand unread items in my reading list now.

But since I'm currently more or less trying to find ideas where ChatGPT can help me - why not there? With that nice ChatGPT API it was not much work to write a Javascript Bookmarklet that takes the text of the currently shown webpage, feeds it to ChatGPT together with the question "What is the new or surprising information in the following text?", and shows an alert with the result. That does help a lot since many long articles contain a lot of introduction, "human interest stories" and whatnot, till you finally get to an interesting tidbit of information hidden somewhere. But there is more: usually it turns out not to be too interesting except for one or two things I'd like to hear about more. So, of course, there is a second bookmarklet that let's you ask a question about those.

So my current workflow when stumbling over an interesting article is:

  1. Read ChatGPT's summary. Then perhaps:
  2. Ask a followup question about what was really interesting to me. Then perhaps:
  3. Save it to Pocket for later reading.

OK, OK, the fourth step would be "read it", and that's often still missing. But it's still an improvement. :-)

If you here are those bookmarklets. They are in my ChatGPT Toolbox.