How to Create a ChatGPT Skill (Step-by-Step)

From the video's captions, lightly corrected. [unclear] marks audio we could not make out.

1. 0:00

   Hey there, my name's Chris, and in this video, I'm gonna show you how to build agent skills in ChatGPT. Let's get started.

2. 0:06

   Agent skills are a super important thing to understand how to build inside any kind of modern AI environment, because they provide you with the opportunity to teach AI something one time, go through that painstaking process of getting the right result, and then training it to give you that result every single time you ask for that task.

3. 0:29

   So, for example, things that are, you know, blocking and tackling of the day, maybe reading your inbox and telling you who to respond to. You could leave it up to chance and just ask it, "Hey, go read my email inbox and tell me that." Or if you had a very particular way, maybe you've got a boss, maybe you've got external vendors, maybe you've got follow-up that you need to send, you need to go read your drafts. In those sorts of situations, AI is not gonna understand out of the box what you're looking for, and that's a perfect opportunity to build a skill. So let me show you where to start off in ChatGPT to find your skills.

4. 1:08

   All right, so if you're looking to find where your skills are stored, just to see if you have any already and you just don't know about, you're gonna move on over to the left-hand side rail. You're gonna see Plugins in the top left-hand corner. Click that, and then in the top left-hand corner, there is a little toggle between Plugins and Skills. And you're gonna go ahead and click Skills, and you'll see any skills that you have installed.

5. 1:34

   Same exact process if you go through on the ChatGPT web app. You're gonna see Plugins, and then you're gonna go over and you'll see Plugins and Skills, and you'll move on over.

6. 1:45

   Now, you might be wondering, you're like, "Okay, wait, why do you have skills on your desktop app and skills on your web app?" Some skills are stored locally. You can ask them to be stored non-locally. You can say, you know, kinda upload that. Or what you can do is you can just download the skills, it's just like a certain file format, and install them onto your web app.

7. 2:08

   But I'm telling you all these dorky things and I'm like, "Okay, what, what exactly can skills do?" Well, from a realistic perspective, skills are very important for doing routine business tasks, because there's normally a way we like to do things. So for me, I'll tell you how I use it.

8. 2:24

   I'll tell you one of the things that I do not love doing is invoicing every month. It's a great feeling at the end of the month to have money to collect from clients, but it's really a pain to go through and figure out how many hours I've worked for them, setting up the invoice. You know, some people are on some different billing because they come through on a referral network, so I'm offering a preferred rate at that time. There's a lot of nuance around it.

9. 2:50

   So what I've done is I've created a skill to where all I have to do is click Aravise Monthly Invoicing and click Enter, and it's gonna go through and it's gonna create all of the invoices that I need for the month. It's gonna look through my calendar. It's gonna look through other elements of my life and figure out, first of all, are there any outstanding invoices from this client that they didn't pay from last month? Luckily, I have some wonderful clients that don't forget to pay. They are busy though, so sometimes it does happen. But you can just say, "Okay, do the monthly invoicing," and it'll go through and it'll do the thing.

10. 3:27

    So what we're gonna do is we're gonna make a skill to go and take the Bloomberg quiz for us. All right, so we are all signed in here. We've got Bloomberg up here, so it'll be able to log in and do the quiz for us. So let me show you exactly how we're going to build the skill.

11. 3:45

    So it's important to note that there actually is a magic word when you're talking to either ChatGPT or Claude when you're trying to get it to build a skill. You have to tell it, "I'm trying to create a skill," or, "I'm looking to build a skill," or you have to say the word skill, or else it's not going to natively understand that you're trying to do this. It may get there eventually, but it's not gonna natively understand it. So we'll say the magic word, and we'll tell it what we want.

12. 4:13

    "I would like you to create a skill for me to take control of my browser and fill out the Bloomberg quiz and report back the results from the quiz into the chat. You should call this skill Take My Bloomberg Quiz." So let's go ahead and see it in action here.

13. 4:35

    All right, so looking through here, we can see we said the magic word right, because it says, "I'll use the Skill Creator skill." So how meta is that? It's gonna use the skill that someone taught it to create skills to make one for us. Again, reiterating, a skill is just a predetermined set of behaviors that you can teach an agent. So as it does not just deviate every time you do it. So that's why they've released it like that. That's why they've coded it into a skill, so that any time anyone across the world asks for it, it's gonna give you a repeatable creation of a skill.

14. 5:14

    All right. So it's finished up here. So we can see here, created and validated Take My Bloomberg Quiz. Invoke it with Take My Bloomberg Quiz. And you see this little stack icon thing here? This is a skill. But basically, any time you say the words "Take My Bloomberg skill," your AI is gonna go through and it's gonna read this. It's gonna go and it's gonna complete the quiz, and it's gonna verify and report. That's just super basic. But, you know, you could think about this being very, very long. You could have a very long skill. You could have lots of references. We'll go through those in future videos.

15. 5:53

    So just to prove that it works without us telling it explicitly to do it here, I'm gonna start a new chat. So we're gonna reset the context here. And I'm gonna say, "I want you to take my Bloomberg quiz for me."

16. 6:08

    All right. So what we can see here is we can see I'm using your Bloomberg quiz skills. So we already know that it's gonna go follow the directions that we've given it. It's taken over the browser here, and it is starting to click through. And you can see its mouse there. So its mouse is in the center of the screen. I'm not doing anything. Actually, it has this, like, little mini browser over here. Let's see if we can click into that. There we go. How to play. It's going through. It understands how to play. You know, I'm always curious how it's gonna decide these bets here. Oh, well, I guess it's just not gonna decide the bets at all. That's bad form. Maybe we need to teach it to decide the bets next time.

17. 6:45

    Okay, so we can see here that it is working through. I'm just gonna pause and come back whenever it's finished up.

18. 6:57

    All right. So we can see here that it finished up. It went through, it worked for five minutes and 19 seconds, and we can even look at a little bit of its thought process here. It went through and looked like it would read what was on the site, then it would go search online. So probably not how you're supposed to play the game, but hey, you know what? We're telling AI to do it for us. So there you go.

19. 7:19

    That's how you create a skill, just a very basic skill. There's much more advanced techniques for skill creation, things that would help you create templated documents or work output product and templates, adhering to brand guidelines, making them shareable. These are things that we can talk about in future videos.

20. 7:40

    Really curious to hear if you're using skills and whether or not you're finding any success, or where you would like to employ them next but you don't know where. So until next time, thank you so much for watching. Subscribe, drop a like. It really helps the channel. Thank you so much.