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The best ChatGPT plug-ins you can use

AI PDF custom GPT.
Jon Martindale / DigitalTrends

ChatGPT is an amazing tool, and when they were introduced, plug-ins made it even better. But as of March 2024, they’re no longer available as part of ChatGPT, having since been replaced by Custom GPTs, which you can make yourself. Or you can use one of the many amazing options from other developers, AI fans, and prompt engineers.

Interested in learning about how to make the best custom GPT for you? We have a guide for that. If you’re more interested in the best custom GPTs available now, we have a guide for that too.

ChatGPT and other natural language model artificial intelligences (AI) are evolving all the time, with new and exciting features, and ever-more-impressive capabilities. Other companies are right there with OpenAI, too. Microsoft’s Copilot for Windows is improving by leaps and bounds every time it’s updated. And Google’s Gemini isn’t far behind.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
ChatGPT has folders now
ChatGPT Projects

OpenAI is once again re-creating a Claude feature in ChatGPT. The company announced during Friday's "12 Days of OpenAI" event that its chatbot will now offer a folder system called "Projects" to help users organize their chats and data.

“This is really just another organizational tool. I think of these as smart folders,” Thomas Dimson, an OpenAI staff member, said during the live stream.

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OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode can now see your screen and analyze videos
Advanced Santa voice mode

OpenAI's "12 Days of OpenAI" continued apace on Wednesday with the development team announcing a new seasonal voice for ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode (AVM), as well as new video and screen-sharing capabilities for the conversational AI feature.

Santa Mode, as OpenAI is calling it, is a seasonal feature for AVM, and offers St. Nick's dulcet tones as a preset voice option. It is being released to Plus and Pro subscribers through the website and mobile and desktop apps starting today and will remain so until early January. To access the limited-time feature, first sign in to your Plus or Pro account, then click on the snowflake icon next to the text prompt window.

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One of ChatGPT’s latest features comes to the free tier
ChatGPT's Canvas screen

In October, OpenAI debuted its Canvas feature, a collaborative interface that visually previews the AI response to the user's writing or coding request. However, it was only made available as a beta feature for Plus and Teams subscribers. On Tuesday, the company announced that it is bringing Canvas to all users, even at the free tier.

While one could easily mistake Canvas for a blatant knockoff of Anthropic's Artifacts feature, OpenAI is also incorporating a swath of new capabilities into Canvas. For one, Canvas is now integrated directly into the GPT-4o model so that it runs natively within ChatGPT, eliminating the need to select it specifically from the model-picking list.

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