How To Use ChatGPT and Bard To Get Tech Help

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use online AI to get tech help.

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I've talked many times before about ways you can use things like ChatGPT to be more productive, get things done, and have some fun on your Mac. But you could also use it for Tech Support. Now a lot of times when we have tech questions we search online. There are tons of forums and discussion groups and blog posts and YouTube videos that talk about how to solve different tech problems. Much of this has been incorporated, of course, into the large language models that make up these online AI Chat Bots like ChatGPT. So a lot of times it is very easy to ask a tech question there and get an answer rather than searching and reading tons of different web pages to try to put together a solution. 

So, for instance, let's start with ChatGPT at chat.openai.com. Now when you go to this website and you don't have an account you can setup a free account. Hopefully, it's not too busy and you can get on and ask a simple question like this one: How do I add an email account to Mac Mail. Then the answer you'll get usually gives you a step-by-step.

In this case it gives you 5 steps. Open the Mail app. Click on the Mail menu and Add Account. Then select your email service. If you're provided is not listed here's what to do. Enter email address. Click Sign-in. It's the basic steps. So you probable could have found the same thing with a web search. But here it just gave you the result right away and told you exactly what to do. 

Let's try another one. This time maybe an iPhone question. How do I transfer my data from my old iPhone to a new one. So in this case it runs you through several different options. For instance you can use Apple's Quick Start and it tells you here that use Quick Start to transfer your data wirelessly. You could also use iCloud Backup. You can use iTunes and it even tells you if you switch from an android device to an iPhone that  you can do it this way. So at the very least it gives you a general idea of what to do. 

Now, of course, the idea here is you Chat. So if you have follow-up questions you could ask, unlike a webpage, you can actually treat this like you're chatting with a tech support person. So you can ask it for more information about this Quick Start option. How does Quick Start work? You don't have to go and rephrase the entire question. You can just continue to do this like a conversation. You can see here the results were a step-by-step of how you use Quick Start to transfer your data from an old iPhone to a new one. Again, you could have found this information elsewhere but notice how quickly I was able to get the information. I may have had to search around a bit to find the right page at Apple or maybe go through a few pages, read a few things, maybe with some conflicting information, before I got this step-by-step. 

You can even go beyond your Apple devices. You can ask any tech support question. So maybe something more general like this. My Wi-Fi isn't working. Here I'm not even phrasing it like a question. I'm just putting a statement out there. Let's see what ChatGPT comes up with. Of course it correctly assesses that I'm having trouble and I'm asking for help. It gives me a bunch of different good suggestions to get my Wi-Fi working again.

Now one thing to consider with ChatGPT is that all of the data that it uses is old. It's from mid-2021. So, of course, over time that's going to be updated. So right now if you have a question that is specific to something more recent, like the latest versions of macOS and all, then you're probably not going to find the answer specific to what you're using now. So general tech questions work really well. But there are alternatives to ChatGPT. For instance you could sign-up for Goggle's BARD and BARD has current information on it. Goggle, of course, being a search engine that's their specialty. So a lot of other stuff that ChatGPT does BARD doesn't go. But getting information that's current to today is something BARD will do. 

So go to bard.goggle.com. You get on the waiting list. It usually doesn't take long. Then you can use BARD for questions like this one. How do I recover a forgotten Apple ID password. You can see BARD is going to be a little difficult on this one. I'm not asking BARD to actually do it for me. I just want BARD to give me the steps. So maybe I'll just rephrase. What are the steps to recovering a lost Apple ID password. So here you go. Now you get the steps to do it. It will be up-to-date for this year. Not some old information. 

Let's give BARD another question and see how well it does. How do I free up storage space on my Mac? So you can see here you get some good suggestions on this question from BARD as well. Let's compare that to ChatGPT. How do I free up storage space on my Mac? So you get a few more suggestions here. Remember you could always ask for more. 

Now I know a lot of you have already heard that these AI Chat Bots aren't always completely accurate. Sometimes they will give you wrong information. They will do it with confidence and makes it seem like they really know what they're talking about. Well, guess what. The same thing is true for any other source on the internet. There are tons of replies posted on Apple's discussion groups, on Reddit, and all sorts of other places that give you just wrong tech information. So, this is common whether it is a human or an AI that is answering your question. At least with AI if the large language model has many different solutions to the same question and one of them is wrong and a whole bunch of them are right then you're probably going to get information from the majority of answers that are right. But even a live tech support person from Apple can sometimes give you wrong information. I've heard that many times from people. I'm sure most of the time the information is accurate and I think it is the same thing here using the different AI Chat Bots. 

Now when it comes to actually asking the question a big advantage to ChatGPT or BARD is that you get the answer right away. So it is not like asking a question and then having to check back all the time to see if somebody has helped you. 

Now, of course, you can also ask other kinds of tech questions. It doesn't have to be about Apple products or even computers. How do I replace the water filter in my fridge? Or something like this: My vacuum isn't working right. What can I check?  You can ask follow-up questions and so on. 

In a way these AI's are kind of like having a friend that knows a lot about everything even though they may not be right a 100% of the time. But an advantage is you're not bothering anybody when you ask them the question. You can keep pestering them with questions and it will never get tired of it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.