Creating Virtual Ray, a Custom GPT

Virtual RayRay Poynter, 5 November 2024

One of the neat features of ChatGPT is the ability to create Custom GPTs. A Custom GPT allows you to build a bespoke tool on top of ChatGPT, creating a unique product. In this post I am going to tell you how I created a simple ‘Virtual Ray’ via a Custom GPT.

What is Virtual Ray?
If you have a ChatGPT account (even a free one) click on this link and it will take you to Virtual Ray. If you ask it a market research question it will try to give you the answer that I would have given to that same question. It is a long way from perfect, but I think it is an interesting experiment and I would love to hear your views.

Creating Virtual Ray
The first step was to log in to my ChatGPT Team account. From there I selected “Explore GPTs” and then selected Create.

Virtual Ray consists of very few components: a name, an image, a short description, a set of rules, some question starters, and a knowledge base.

The rules include things like Speak of Ray in the third person, e.g., Ray would have said. Give priority to the information in the uploaded data over what you already know. Do not make assumptions.

The knowledge I uploaded included all of my recent blogs from NewMR.org (a friend created a quick program to download them, strip out the guest posts, and put them in a text file), all of my LinkedIn articles (via LinkedIn’s export and then ChatGPT tidying them up), and a cross-section of things I have written over the last few years where I own the copyright.

With all of those in place, I asked ChatGPT to create the Custom GPT, and then I tested it. After testing it, I tweaked the rules, mostly to get it to pay more attention to my content and less to its own knowledge, and I reduced the number of files my knowledge base comprises. It seems to work better with fewer files, and I may end up with just one really big file.

Once I was ready to let other people play with it I created a shared link, and that is what you will access if you click here.

Thoughts about the future?
In terms of Virtual Ray, I want to find easier ways to add more knowledge from my past writings, ideally adding also voice and video uploads. I want to keep tweaking the rules to make the answers closer to what I would actually say, and I want to create a version that does not require people to use a ChatGPT account in order to access it. Ideally, and with the users’ consent I would like to know what questions people are asking it and what they think of the answers, so that I (real Ray) can add additional answers that are based on what I would actually say.

In terms of other users of Custom GPT, if you go to Explore GPTs, you will see ready-built Custom GPTs such as Logo Creator, Image Creator, Resume, Code Tutor, and ChatGPT Cases for Work.

I can see great potential for this sort of approach, allowing organizations to create standards and policies to help their staff to apply what are considered ‘best practices’ in their business and create a reliable and unique service.