Introduction
If you follow the tech world to any great extent, you’ve probably heard or read about ChatGPT and other AI (artificial intelligence) tools. But what are they exactly, and how are they used? Furthermore, what sort of benefits and challenges to ChatGPT and other AI tools present to speakers?
In this article, we’ll attempt to answer these questions and more. We will focus specifically on ChatGPT and other text generation tools such as Lex, Jasper, and copy.ai. These tools use a language model known as GPT-3, which essentially means that it can learn from existing written text to generate its own text in response to human inputs. This language model has gotten increasingly sophisticated over the last few years, and has been used to humorous ends, such as writing a poem about Siri and Alexa as Romeo and Juliet. Yet there are many areas of business that ChatGPT and similar tools are poised to disrupt, and the implications are not yet clear.
That said, here are a few ways that ChatGPT is fairly certain to be of use for you in your career, and specifically in your career as a professional public speaker. This article drew inspiration from AI expert Allie K. Miller, who posted a longer piece on LinkedIn entitled, “ChatGPT and The Professional’s Guide to Using AI.”
Finding Speaker Gigs with ChatGPT
Suppose you are a speaker looking for new gigs. You’ve read our article on actionable ways to find paid speaking opportunities in any industry, and you’re looking for next steps. Well, ChatGPT can help.
If you are interested in gardening and want to speak at a gardening club, you might ask ChatGPT, “What are the closest gardening clubs to my location, Greenville, South Carolina?” Without having to Google and comb through a list of links, you’ll get a result that looks something like this:
What are the closest gardening clubs to my location, Greenville SC?
- Greenville County Master Gardener Association (GCMGA)
- Greenville Area Master Gardener Association (GAMGA)
- Pickens County Master Gardener Association (PCMGA)
- Upstate South Carolina Master Gardener Association (USCMGA)
- Greenville County Gardeners (GCG)
- Greenville Garden Club (GGC)
- Greer Garden Club (GGC)
- Spartanburg County Master Gardeners (SCMG)
Pitching Event Organizers with ChatGPT
So you’ve found a list of garden clubs and found contacts for each one. But now you have writer’s block about how to reach out. What should you say in that email? Well, ChatGPT can help you once again. For example, you could prompt it by saying: “I’m a professional speaker on <YOUR TOPIC> and am pitching my talk for Spartanburg County Master Gardeners. Generate an initial reach-out email asking them when their next event is, and if they have any speakers lined up.”
Once you have this sales email ready to go, you can substitute other leads and generate follow up email ideas by modifying the prompt. You can even anticipate follow up questions by prompting ChatGPT something like: “I’m a professional speaker on <YOUR TOPIC> and am trying to book gigs. What 3 questions from event organizers should I be prepared to answer if I want to get booked and paid to speak?
Marketing yourself as a speaker with ChatGPT
If you’ve started building your speaking website, you might have thought about what kind of copy you want on the site by section. ChatGPT can give you several sections to include by prompting it, “List sections to include on my speaker website and include placeholder copy for each one. Make sure to consider my topic area, <YOUR TOPIC>.”
You could also generate quick market trend insights by asking ChatGPT, “What are the top 10 trends in gardening, especially as it relates to <YOUR TOPIC>?”
Trying to draft social media posts to build your brand? You can use a prompt like this: “Write 5 witty Instagram posts about gardening. And use a similar writing style to this one: <paste previously published caption from your brand>”
Managing logistics as a speaker with ChatGPT
ChatGPT can help you come up with a schedule, summarize meeting notes, and prioritize tasks. So for example, if you are preparing for a conference, you might have a list of meeting notes from an onboarding call with an event organizer. You can use ChatGPT to generate a list of action items based on the notes through a prompt like this.
Example prompt: “Summarize these notes from my meeting with the Spartanburg County Master Gardeners leadership team. At the end, create a set of important action items to complete by the end of the week. Here are the notes: <paste notes>”
Suppose you are trying to get a sense of your schedule for the event. You can use ChatGPT to generate a rough first draft of a schedule.
Example prompt: “Create a schedule for event this weekend. I need to be onstage at 2pm for a sound check. The event starts at 4pm. My flight arrives at 9am at JFK. The hotel is in midtown Manhattan and check in doesn’t start till 3pm. I need 30 minutes to practice the talk, 1 hour to meet with the event organizer, and 1 hour for lunch.”
If you’re getting overwhelmed, you can even use ChatGPT to figure out what your priorities should be among multiple stakeholders.
“I have to do four things: I have to finish my speaker contract, scrub my website content for old info from 2021, update my email for OOO responder, and call Susan, my speaking agent. Please tell me what order I should do these in. Let me know how much time each task will take.”
General ChatGPT Use Cases for speakers
Professionals in any industry can use ChatGPT for their work. Below are those use cases as well as example prompts that anyone, regardless of domain, can use.
Summarization: Enter a selection of text and tell ChatGPT, “Summarize this article for me.” You can even say something like, “Summarize this article for me at a 2nd grade level.”
Feel free to try the Summary idea on this very article. Copy the URL from this article, navigate to ChatGPT, and type in the following prompt: “Please summarize this article: <LINK>”. ChatGPT will summarize the whole thing for you to the best of its ability. If you just want a piece of the article summarized, you can copy and paste that section and do the same process.
Planning. If you have an overwhelming task as a public speaker that you want to plan with a reasonable timeline, you can ask, “Create a schedule for me to launch my professional speaking career by May 1, 2023. Please include deliverables, timelines, contingency planning, promotional activities, speechwriting, and events.”
Creativity. Suppose you want to revamp your talk. You could prompt ChatGPT by saying, “I’m looking to revamp aspects of my public speaking and I love to incorporate aspects of improv, art, music, and technology into my performances. What are three unique speaking engagements that I can do incorporating each of these aspects?
Feeling stuck. Do you have an advertisement, email, or speech you’ve been meaning to write but need a little push? Just ask, “Write a captivating advertisement that details my services as a public speaker that I can post on social media.” Use that as a foundation, then edit or tweak as needed.
ChatGPT tips for speakers
- Be specific. Rather than asking ChatGPT to write a boring, generic tweet about public speaking, ask it to write about the ways that successful speakers use humor and how that relates to storytelling. Rather than asking it to write an essay, ask it to write an essay about confidence at a 5th grade reading level. The more specific you are, the more interesting your outputs will be.
- Add conditions. To get the best possible results, add parameters. Customize your question with specifications like keeping the response to fewer than 150 words, using the word “persuasive,” avoiding the word “capricious,” breaking down a concept step-by-step, conveying the advice in simple terms, creating a program that’s within a particular budget, devising an approach for a large audience, etc.
- Try role playing with ChatGPT. To increase the value of the output, do some role play. Begin your prompt with “Pretend you’re a public speaking coach” and you’ll get more practical advice from ChatGPT. There are a wealth of role play possibilities you can pick from. Perhaps event organizer, audience member, or mentor could be useful for your public speaking career!
- Ask for multiple options. If you’re generating something like product names or email subject lines, don’t just ask for one option, ask for 10 options. It will give you more first ideas to work from, and you might want to grab parts from each. This will likely speed up your whole process.
- Click “regenerate”. If you’re not satisfied with ChatGPT’s answer, just hit “regenerate” at the bottom of the screen. You can review other answers by clicking on the arrow to the left of the OpenAI green logo.
- Try converting results to spreadsheets. ChatGPT can convert its outputs into tables, lists, flowcharts, code, and more. If you don’t want a bunch of long-winded paragraphs, you could ask for a bullet list or a spreadsheet format.
Conclusion
So you’ve gleaned a bunch of information on ChatGPT and practical examples of how it can help you in your speaking career. Want more? Check out the original LinkedIn post from AI expert Allie K. Miller, “ChatGPT and The Professional’s Guide to Using AI.”
Once you’re done, feel free to take a look at our list of top public speaking books and top public speaking podcasts here!
Want to read more about speaking tips? Take a look at our 100 tips for motivational speaking for any speaking engagement!
Happy speaking!
