Introduction
Generative AI has been making big leaps in recent years, starting with GPT-3, which could handle conversations pretty convincingly. Sure it couldn’t generate images at first and sucked at math, but incremental improvements have rectified these shortcomings.
The United Nations said recently that AI has tremendous potential to generate economic growth, but is also expected to impact 40% of jobs. Companies developing these tools also say that AI is already helping to create new material, medicines, and unlocking other discoveries.
While these developments are exciting, normal people are largely stuck with chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, which are extremely useful, but aren’t specialized for any particular task, and for the best responses, require a lengthy and specific prompt each time. What if you could create an AI app that’s designed for a specific task, using just natural language instructions, to get the most out of these chatbots. Well luckily, there are three tools I use, and there are probably more that let you do just that.
AI apps, or bots (as I call them interchangeably) are incredibly useful tools that are set up with specific instructions. Once you have outlined what you want them to do, you can enter a short prompt then the AI will combine this piece of information with the instructions to generate excellent answers, formatted however you specify.
The applications that you can create are almost limitless. I have mainly been creating AI apps for myself within Poe for most of 2024, possibly into 2023, and have recently started using Gemini’s Gems feature which essentially lets you do the same thing. I have made a lot of useful apps that benefit me and still get new ideas every week.
If you ever come up with ideas for a bot that will have broad appeal, you even have the option of monetizing your bots on Poe. Gemini’s Gems are more restricted in that your apps are for you, and you only. Aside from Poe and Gems, there is also a website run by Amazon called Partyrock, which can also be used to make apps that are a bit more complex and flexible.
In this editorial, I’m going to argue that AI apps, which are developed solely with natural language, are one of the most important developments in the generative AI revolution. The vast amount of apps that you can create, and the efficiency they deliver, really make them worthwhile to dig into. As they just rely on natural language, they’re also very democratic, in that anyone can build them once they know what apps are and where to go to make them.
I will also explain how you can make these apps on Poe or Gemini and share some of the things that I have learned while creating my own. If you have any experience in this area and have any tips for me, leave them in the comments so I and other readers can improve our creations too.
In the next section of this editorial I will put across the utility benefits of AI apps in detail, then I will guide you through the creation process, and then let you know where I think AI apps are heading.
Enhanced Efficiency and Accuracy
The point of custom bots or apps, is that you design them with some specific function in mind, this is opposed to general bots like ChatGPT where they are good at anything across the board, but need larger queries from you to get an answer exactly how you want it.
One bot that I have created is a balanced diet bot. It is also instructed to pay attention to the user’s location, what the current month is, what cooking utensils the user has, dietary restrictions, and health issues. If a user in the US had no dietary restrictions or health conditions, they could just type ‘US April Microwave’ into the bot, it would understand this and then present a list of 30 meal options. I told the bot what input to expect from the users and to present a list of 30 options (presented with a numbered list).
It has then been told to expect a number from the user correlating to a meal option and when it gets this it gives you ingredients, cooking instructions, and the health benefits. Each of the things it displays like the ingredients are pre-programmed in the custom instructions so that it outputs its answers in a regular way.
If you wanted to make ChatGPT do something similar, you’d have to type a lengthy prompt such as ‘I am based in the US, the month is April, I have a microwave oven. Give me ingredients and cooking instructions for a meal using peak season foods so I can keep the costs down’. Even then, it wouldn’t offer a menu of dishes like the app and the prompt is much longer. If you frequently want to do this, asking a general bot like ChatGPT is highly inefficient and a custom app can do it much better.
I have mentioned that using custom apps can be a lot faster and this brings with it the benefit that less errors are made, thanks to not having to type long prompts. While individuals can benefit from custom apps for tasks like creating meals, businesses can also create them to help with a plethora of tasks that I haven’t even thought of. They could use them to improve the quality of documents, come up with business ideas, business plans, and much more.
Personalized Experiences
When I began creating my bots, I used to just tell it what type of answers to give, whether they should be long or short, and what tone of voice to use. As time went on I experimented with the styling such as bolding conclusions for easier readability. Currently, I don’t do that, but I frequently get bots to include headers and emoji to break up the text and make the output look more interesting.
One app that I’ve made that leverage emoji and titles quite effectively is my Fill Knowledge Gaps bot that I made on Gemini Gems. With this bot, you just give a topic that you want to know more about and it educates you starting from introductory information and gets more advanced. It puts relevant emoji throughout the answer to help break up big blocks of the test, and uses titles to introduce new sections, also providing breaks throughout the answer.
With these customizations, the user experience is more pleasant and these are by far not the only customizations you can make. Some other ways to customize the text include with ordered lists, unordered lists, and tables. You just tell the custom app what parts of its output should use these and then it will do it.
Automation of Niche Tasks
Once I have an idea and convert it into a custom AI bot, I usually think it's brilliant and spend the rest of the day using it. Unlike ChatGPT, the inputs on these bots are minimal because the custom prompt I wrote for the bot does most of the heavy lifting. While I think a bot might be really good, many other people wouldn’t have a need for it; each application generally has a niche use. While they are niche, I think many people can benefit from creating their own custom AI bots either concerning work or day to day life.
Thanks to their programming detailing how to do a certain task, the bots are implicitly very niche. For example, I have a pathway bot that will literally give you a multi-stage pathway to get better at hobbies or pursue a particular career, but outside of producing stages to achieve your goals, it won’t do anything really. It’s the same thing with my balanced diet bot, if you try to ask it something, it will give you a limited answer then drags you back to the task of providing your country, the month, and cooking equipment so it can do what it was designed for.
By having these individual apps that expect short inputs, and rely on lengthier custom prompts, you can save time by not needing to type in a big prompt every time, like you have to on ChatGPT. This allows you to find out what you want to know faster so that you can get on with something else. If you’ve used AI a lot, you know that it can be fatiguing to keep typing to them, and sometimes you just want AI apps to speed things along.
Creative Exploration and Idea Generation
Custom bots can be useful in various creative roles ranging from writing to art. A science communicator, for example, could create a bot that extracts important information from research papers and pulls out important findings and other data. Instead of sifting through 50 pages of a paper, they can get on with their article, video, or podcast, and just spend time reading the parts of the paper outlined by the bot.
Another common use for these AI bots is as an editor, just paste in some text and a bot can be programmed to scrutinize your text and give recommendations, formatted in a way that you like. A journalist could also use an AI bot to highlight the most important points from a press release and organize the information using the inverted triangle technique so they don't miss any important details to communicate with their readers.
Honestly, the possibilities for bots in creative fields are expansive. All you need to do is get a good idea, and then spend a while implementing the instructions until it works just the way you like it.
Educational Tools
When it comes to education, custom AI apps have massive potential. These are one of the main things that I have used these tools for. I have a pathway bot that can give you a roadmap for any goal, the Fill Knowledge Gaps bot that I mentioned earlier that can explain any topic in a friendly way, I have created a textbook one that tries to help you learn a topic the same way a textbook teaches you, and also a curriculum bot, which can help you target topics to learn to reach an overall goal - this is one bot idea where you may want to tell the bot to format the output as a table (although, I can't get them to work reliably in Gemini).
AI apps that you make can be adjusted in various ways to make them more accessible and vary in terms of learning style. One thing I baked into my Fill Knowledge Gaps bot are some knowledge retention techniques including spaced repetition, interleaving (where some of the easier things you’ve read get brought up again in the harder content), and rhetorical questions. I also chose to add review questions to each output to see if I can remember what I’ve learned, if I don’t remember, I can go back and check the answer again.
This is just a short list of bots that I’ve made over time and have created many more niche bots to fill various needs. The ones that I’ve mentioned are just ones that I find myself using frequently.
Defining Your Bot's Purpose and Persona
In creating your own custom bots, the first thing that you need to think about is its purpose. What you want the bot to do will make up the core of your instructions for the bot. This will be accompanied with stylistic instructions (headers etc) and voice tone. If you want to make a character, for example, their tone of voice will be a very important aspect, in fact, the model you choose can also be important too because some are more strict and won’t bend as much as you’d want them to.
Choosing Your Platform
Another important factor is deciding which platform you want to use. If you’d like to share your bot or want to select a particular model, then Poe is the platform for you. If you just want a bot for yourself, and don’t want to worry about Poe’s query limits, then Gemini Gems could be a good choice. For those who want to create something more advanced, then Amazon’s Partyrock might be a good choice, but I’ve not spent too much time creating there.
Defining the Bot's Instructions and Knowledge Base
The most critical step of the bot-creation process is writing clear and specific prompts, instructing it what you’d like it to do. In this stage, you need to outline the core task, tell your bot any guidelines or constraints you have for it, and provide any negative constraints such as telling your bot what not to say, if that’s an important aspect.
As an example prompt, here is what I have written for my Fill Knowledge Gaps bot on Gemini’s Gems:
‘Users let you know what topic they'd like to learn about. You should assume zero knowledge and explain the item in detail going from introductory to advanced information. Keep jargon to a minimum. Use retention techniques like interleaving, spaced repetition, and rhetorical questions. You should use titles and subtitles adaptively to help improve the answer. Use common, popular emoji. Respond in English unless the user sends a query in another language. If you do not know about a topic, just say so, it is ok; it's preferable than giving false information. Include review questions at the end. Do not use LaTeX formatting.’
If there are some things in here that seem a bit random like the LaTeX formatting and responding in English, unless told otherwise, that’s because I found these instructions to be useful after noting several problems during testing. When I was asking it about linear algebra it tried to format an example using LaTeX, but it didn’t render it properly. Now that I’ve told it not to use that formatting, it renders it properly another way.
As for the command to respond in English by default, this is because the app was inserting foreign words and characters in its answer randomly, but since giving this instruction, it no longer has this problem.
The first few lines outline the core task of the app while the line about titles, subtitles, and emoji are related to the styling of the response. Initially, I told it to ‘use emoji’ but Gemini is extra finicky and was trying to use emoji that couldn’t be rendered for some reason and just had a weird code in their place, so I told it to stick to popular emoji.
As you can see, the process of creating a good bot isn’t just a matter of giving it instructions and then never touching the prompt again. You also have to do testing and try to fix any problems that arise.
To make your bot on Poe.com, just look for the big ‘Create Bot’ button in the top-left once you’re logged in and select Prompt bot, from there you can choose the settings you want. On Google Gemini, press ‘Gem manager’ on the left-hand sidebar, the press ‘New Gem’ and input the title, prompt, and any knowledge sources you want.
What’s nice about Gemini Gems is that your bot usually has a good amount of knowledge about its topic thanks to web access. However, if you want to make a bot based on a highly specific topic, both Gemini Gems and Poe let you add your own source documents to give the bot more knowledge. These can be added from the respective bot editing pages on both platforms.
Most of the time, you can rely on web access and a bot’s in-built knowledge, but if you need it, then the option to upload your own documents is there too.
Configuring Advanced Settings
For those who have opted to use Poe, there is a drop down in the bot editor that allows you to pick which language model you want to power your bot. GPT-4o mini and Gemini Flash 2.0 are my usual picks because they consume less points per query. I find it easier to write prompts for GPT-4o mini than Gemini Flash 2.0 because it just gets you, whereas Gemini throws up various issues which require more prompting to fix. With that said, it seems to get internet access where GPT-4o mini doesn’t.
Poe also allows you to mess with the temperature of your bot which influences how unique its answers will be each time you ask the same query. If you move the setting too high, it will eventually give you gibberish, so the default setting is usually good. There are a few other options too on Poe that let you make your bot public or private, give suggested replies, and more.
One of the useful features in Poe is initial prompts, so before the user types, the bot has a hardcoded start message, which you can make say anything you like. This is good if the user should be looking to enter a particular prompt.
Testing and Iteration
I think that the most important part of creating a bot is not the prompt you write, but testing your bot. Whenever you make changes to your bot, you will want to test it to make sure it’s doing what you want, whether that be if its meeting your aims, or making answers in a properly formatted way.
Testing your bots is not something you can do all at once, it will be an iterative process where you think you’ve solved everything until you enter a prompt and the answer sucks in some way, you can then edit the prompt some more and refine your bot.
Conclusion
Once you’ve come up with a good idea for a bot and done a few rounds of testing and refining your prompt, you will be left with a potentially powerful tool that’s difficult to replicate with just ChatGPT or equivalent tool. For this reason, I think that custom bots are one of the biggest things in the AI revolution, and don’t seem to be brought up too much outside of making characters on platforms like Meta and Character AI.
There are lots of useful tools you can build with these AIs, and best of all, it’s free to use them. I realize these apps can hallucinate because they’re still AI, so if you seem skeptical of an output, be sure to double check with reliable sources. However, these hallucinations don’t seem to occur for me very often, so I think they can still be very useful.
As stated before, creating custom apps like these have several benefits. Firstly, they’re highly customizable and can be made to do a plethora of tasks. I’ve created a lot of bots myself ranging from food bots (where I have a goal in mind such as mental health or longevity), a workout creator bot, and much more, including those I’ve mentioned throughout the editorial.
The second benefit of using them is that you can pre-define their tasks in lengthy prompts so you don’t have to sit there typing forever into ChatGPT defining what you want the bot to do each time you want to use it. Think about my recipe finding bot that shows me 30 meal ideas and then gives me ingredients and cooking instructions for my selection to make four servings. It would be a hassle to ask ChatGPT each time, but with a bot, I can ask in seconds and make healthy living that bit easier.
I mentioned before about the risk of hallucination in bots as they rely on flawed AI. While these bots are generally good enough right now, I think the base language models that power them will evolve in the future to significantly reduce hallucinations or entirely overcome them, potentially making bots highly reliable. As the multimodal features of AIs improve, we could also see an expansion in the use of custom bots too.
I firmly believe that custom bots are one of, if not, the best feature when it comes to generative AI. They unlock many cool applications that are quite easy to share with others. They can have a big impact on improving your health through recipe creations and custom workouts, and they can have a significant impact on knowledge acquisition via curriculum apps and bots like Fill Knowledge Gaps, that I made. There are bound to be things that I have not thought of so let us know in the comments if you’ve got anything good and please share your prompt tips.
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