In a matter of months, AI has gone from a clunky aspiration to interwoven into almost everything we touch online. Every day more and more applications are developed. Personally, it has created efficiencies in my world I never thought possible. It doesn’t DO the job for me, I don’t believe in that, but it has assisted me in doing what I do best, that much better. It’s automated those parts of my work that cost time allowing me to focus on serving my team, my clients, and my products to the fullest extent.

Specifically with NLP, I think about it like having the best research assistant on the planet. The fastest notetaker known to man. The most intuitive assistant a guy could ever ask for. I wanted to touch on a very simple but effective use case around summarization that has helped me streamline my own operations and save me time for the things that really matter. Specifically how you can get better outputs from GPT using prompting. 

Prompting is the method with which you interact with AI models like ChatGPT. If you’ve asked ChatGPT a question before, you’ve used prompting. Below are just a couple ways to increase the accuracy and target the output you desire using prompting.

Summarization:

Summarization has saved me countless hours of reformatting coaching notes, meeting notes, legalese, terms of service, you name it. Anything and everything that has a lot of information I want to condense down into small consumable chunks, I utilize prompting techniques with ChatGPT to help me summarize. It’s just a part of my day now. Rather than go into the millions of different use cases I wanted to center specifically around summarizing notes and how to get better summaries with better prompts. You can do this with old school digital note taking or if your online meeting software has dictation, this will work for that too however you’re prompts may be slightly different.

For the purpose of this post we’ll assume you have taken a ton of notes from a large executive meeting and now need to button it up for the rest to consume. 

Simple Prompt:

We can start with a prompt like, “Please summarize the notes below:”, then copy and paste your notes and drop them all into GPT-4. In seconds, your entire “stream of consciousness” notes will be summarized. It’s good, and ChatGPT can definitely get the job done but you may still have missed important aspects or still need to reformat and rearrange.

Your prompt will look something like this:

Summarize the notes below:
[PASTE YOUR NOTES HERE]

Adding Context:

Now let’s add some context. One method of improving the output is by giving better instruction on your desired output. Rather than simply saying, “Summarize the notes.” Tell GPT how you want the notes summarized. By adding context you are training the AI to understand the why behind what it’s doing. Remember, as it stands today, GPT doesn’t actually know what it’s doing (so we think) but rather is doing what it thinks it should do based on the data it’s been fed. Here are a few examples of how to add context:

Defining the specific kind of summary you want: For example, if you want the AI to summarize a lengthy notes document that is highly technical in nature and you want to share it with non technical individuals your prompt could look something like this:

Summarize this article in language appropriate for a 5th-grade student.
[PASTE NOTES HERE]

Adding a goal or perspective: For instance, if you want a summary that focuses on the profitability of the topics discussed, you could create a prompt that looks like this:

Summarize the notes from yesterday’s executive meeting at XYZ Corporation, where the primary agenda was to discuss the company’s new product launch strategy. Please highlight the key decisions made, action items assigned to various teams, and any important considerations regarding the marketing budget.:

[PASTE NOTES HERE] 

Restricting the length of the summary: If you need a short summary, specify the length. You can add this to the above goal or perspective to create more context for the AI to follow. Add something like this:

Provide three paragraphs summary of the following text:
[PASTE NOTES HERE]

Using Inline Instructions: If you have a long text and you want the AI to summarize only certain parts, you can guide it by saying something like

Summarize the following text, but focus specifically on the sections related to customer feedback:
[PASTE NOTES HERE]

Remember that the context should be relevant and clear. The AI uses the context as a guide, so providing a well-defined and accurate context will help get a better response.

Add A Role:

One of the simplest ways to improve your prompt is to define WHO ChatGPT should be. By giving it a role you are giving it a perspective based on the knowledge set it is trained on. You’re telling it to “Act as if” in some form or fashion. This is a great way to craft even better summaries. Admittedly, giving it a role as “note taker” may be a bit overkill. Roles are better suited for when you are researching topics or getting outputs you need specifically defined as a developer, a scientist, a mathematician, a lawyer, etc. Keep in mind that ChatGPT will tell you specifically that it cannot give legal advice so one trick is to tell it you understand it cannot give legal advice but that you’d like to use it to send to your legal team. That further sets context within the role. Below are a few examples of how to add a role to ChatGPT when summarizing your notes:

Marketing Manager Role:

As the marketing manager at XYZ Corporation, please summarize the notes from the executive meeting held yesterday. The meeting focused on refining our marketing strategy for the upcoming product launch. Highlight the key marketing initiatives discussed, decisions made, and action items assigned to the marketing team.
[PASTE NOTES HERE]

HR Director:

As the HR director at DEF Corporation, summarize the notes from the quarterly executive review held recently. The meeting primarily centered around talent acquisition, retention strategies, and organizational development. Focus on any decisions made regarding recruitment, employee engagement initiatives, and talent management.
[PASTE NOTES HERE]

CEO:

As the CEO of GHI Industries, provide a summary of the strategic planning session conducted by the executive team. The session aimed to identify growth opportunities and streamline operations. Please highlight the proposed strategic initiatives, potential areas of expansion, and any action items assigned to key stakeholders.
[PASTE NOTES HERE]

By specifying your role within the company, you establish the context and perspective for the summary, allowing ChatGPT to generate a summary that aligns with your role and responsibilities within the corporate setting.

Few-Shot Prompting:

Few-shot prompting is a technique used to teach AI NLP systems (like ChatGPT) by providing them with a small number of examples. It’s like giving the AI a quick crash course on a specific topic using just a handful of examples. By learning from these examples, the AI can then apply its knowledge to understand and respond to similar questions or tasks in the future. It’s a way to help AI models learn quickly and adapt to new situations with minimal training data.

This is most likely overkill if you’re just using ChatGPT in the browser however I still feel it’s important to note as this prompt method really helps to better “teach” the model what it needs to do. Below are a couple examples of how you can use few-shot prompts. For brevity’s sake I won’t use notation examples but will show you how to do it with product feedback. You’re teaching it to predict the outcome of the actual notes you are summarizing:

Example: 

• I bought this product and it was defective: Negative
• I absolutely loved using the new tool. It made me so much more efficient: Positive
• Customer support was terrible and I couldn’t get my questions answered: Negative
• I would absolutely recommend this product to friends and family:

You can see in the last bullet that I left it blank. What I’ve done is train the model to sniff out sentiment analysis based on some data points. The more data points the better the model is trained. When hitting “send” GPT will return with the output of “Positive”. What you can do with summaries, if space allows, is feed it some of your notes and then show the output you want. If the sample size is small enough you can do this a couple times to hone the model to predict what it should do with the new set of notes you are about to feed it.

As a reminder, many of these may be overkill if all you’re looking for is a summarization of the notes but these prompts can apply to almost anything you are looking to get a specific output from. Digging just a layer deeper can improve the results and allow you to get more out of ChatGPT. Now go have some fun and try them out yourself!

Remember that you are the secret sauce and AI is the assistant. Keep that in mind with everything you hand over. Don’t lose sight of that no matter how well you’re automating your business. Contact me with any questions regarding how to better use AI in your business and your life.