How to Turn Your Chatbot Into a Life Coach

Hello! We’re back with another edition of On Tech: A.I., a pop-up newsletter that teaches you about artificial intelligence, how it works and how to use it.

Last week, I walked you through how to turn A.I. into a personal shopper to speed up product research. Now let’s ask A.I. to try something more ambitious: Helping us set goals and organize our lives to achieve them.

Chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard, it turns out, are actually pretty good at these tasks. I’ll walk you through prompting a chatbot to create an action plan and help you form new habits, including adding your goals into your calendar and to-do list.

First, pick a goal! It helps if there’s a self-help book with pertinent advice. For example, let’s say you want to run a marathon and you just read the book “Slow AF Run Club: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run.”

Now choose a chatbot. I’ll use Open AI’s ChatGPT for this example with web browsing turned on in the settings, since the book is fairly new. Then try this prompt, which I adapted from PromptHero, a database of ChatGPT prompts that have…