ChatGPT and similar long language learning models are here and they won't be disappearing anytime soon. You can either be frightened of it and how it's going to affect your job, or you can embrace it and learn to make it work for you.

If there was one industry that shivered silently as ChatGPT started breaking ground, it was the Virtual Assistant world. Who needs a remote personal assistant to write blog posts for them when they can do it themselves using ChatGPT?

But despite how fascinating this technology is, and how much time it can save you, you still need time to use it in the first place. Whilst using Bard, Claude, ChatGPT or a similar tool will definitely cut down the time a VA would spend on certain tasks, you still need someone using these tools to create your content, proofread, fact-check, and publish for you.

So, before you do away with your VA or freelancer completely, get the best out of both worlds by combining AI with the skills of your VA. You might want to cut down on the hours you need your VA for but trust me, you still need them, and by blending the two, you can save yourself a lot of time and money. Here's how.

Blog Post Writing

Ok, so, we all know with the right prompts you can get ChatGPT to produce lots of ideas for amazing blog post titles, and, once you have those titles, you can get it to write the whole thing for you. Awesome. But, a VA who uses ChatGPT will know the best prompts to use to get the best ideas, and, can then generate the blog post for you, proofread it, fact-check it, and submit it to you for approval, making your job very simple. They can even publish it for you too. So, if you have previously been using your VA to produce blog posts, just tell them you want to save time by asking them to use ChatGPT instead. From a tas that once might have been an hour long, this will cut it right down to less than 20 minutes.

Time saved: 40 Minutes.

2. Social Media Posts

There's nothing harder than trying to come up with interesting content for social media, but again, using the right prompts, ChatGPT can swoop in and do it for you. Or, ask your VA to generate content using the right prompts, and copy and paste them to a planner you can then check and approve, before getting your VA to push them out. You might even find yourself with more time to ask your VA to sort out the images too. A VA knows you well and will understand your style of writing and the themes you like to use. So, using this information they can put the right prompts into ChatGPT to get the very best results.

Time saved: 1 Hour

3. Research

Asking your VA to research something for you might have taken an hour or two previously, but, using ChatGPT, they can refine the answers they need, and then use what they are given to cross reference with actual facts. This is a real-time saver. Remember, ChatGPT can't be trusted to be 100% honest, it's just a machine after all, and will often fill in the gaps with complete nonsense, so it should never be relied upon fully, to give you all the answers you need, without someone doule checking. Will you really have the time to do that?

Time saved: 1 Hour 10 mins

4. Transcription

With all that money you're going to save downgrading to a cheaper monthly support plan, invest £20 per month of it in ChatGPT 4 and see a whole new world of possibilities open up to you. Whisper is a transcription tool, part of the Open.ai family that ChatGPT comes from. In ChatGPT, you can use plugins to start creating integrations and plugins and one of those is with Whisper. I was always making notes for every course or workshop I ever attended but found I simply didn't have the time to write up notes and asking my assistant to transcribe voice notes would be too lengthy. So, I built automation which means the process gets done instantly, and I'm not lying, I really do mean instantly.

Here's how it works. First, I create a Google folder called Audio. Then, I set up a Zapier automation which works like this. Every time I make a voice note which I upload to my Audio folder, Zapier is told to pick up that new recording, fire it over to Whisper who will transcribe it, and then send it back as a Doc in the same Audio folder. For some reason, it doesn't work if you try to rename the audio file, but apart from that, it works in seconds. I can then send that rough copy which hardly ever contains spelling mistakes and is far more accurate than Otter.ai or Descript, to my assistant to format it into something nicer. It's a game-changer and one you just have to try.

Time saved: 1 hour on average

5. Policy Writing

You can find tonnes of templates online for policies and adapt them to suit, but when I needed an AI policy for my VA agency I realised they are practically non-existent. So, I asked ChatGPT to create a basic one for me, specific to the needs of my business. The results were tremendous. That policy might have taken me hours to write, but with ChatGPT it was done in minutes. All I had to do was put it into a nice little document and I was done. As with anything when it comes to ChatGPT, just make sure you double-check facts first, especially if the law is quoted. But the bottom line is, using ChatGPT to help with policies will save a significant amount of time, leaving your VA just to perform fact-checking and cross-referencing.

Time saved: 1 hour 30 mins

Total time saved: 4 Hours, 80 mins. You could reduce a 10-hour monthly support plan down to 5 hours!

These are just a few ideas for the ways combining the skills of your VA with the power of ChatGPT can save you time and by saving you time, you will save money too. The most important thing to remember is not to allow sensitive data to be used in ChatGPT. Thinking about those voice notes and using Whisper to transcribe, you should only do that if the information you are inputting doesn't contain confidential information such as email addresses, company secrets, addresses, names, or anything you wouldn't want anyone else to know.

You have to remember that ChatGPT is a learning model, which means everything you put in, is stored as data to learn from. If you want to use ChatGPT but don't like the idea of your data being used, look at Playground instead, which is more of the back end of ChatGPT. You can do exactly what it says on the tin, you can play without fear of the machine learning from what you input.

If you need a tech VA who knows exactly how to use ChatGPT in a way that can save you time and money, email us at info@ltvaservices.com