How to Use AI Chatbots for Planning Trips, Shopping, and Other Daily Tasks

AI chatbots can be useful tools for making your daily tasks a little easier. You can get help with everything from planning trips or shopping to creating to-do lists or writing emails.

What Are AI Chatbots, and What Can They Do?

You’d have to have been living under a rock not to have at least heard mention of AI chatbots in recent years. The rise of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude AI has been nothing short of phenomenal, with major companies such as Meta, Google, and Apple putting huge amounts of money into developing their own AI products.

An AI chatbot is a piece of software that can hold human-like conversations. These apps use natural language processing to understand the meaning of the user input. The responses are generated by machine learning models known as Large Language Models (LLMs) which have been trained on huge amounts of text data.

The LLM uses the patterns from this data to predict the most likely word to give as the first word of the response. It then repeats the process to generate the next word, and so on. Because LLMs are trained on text generated by humans, the responses usually sound very much like the responses a human would give.

How to Use AI Chatbots for Planning Trips

There are plenty of AI chatbot apps specifically designed for planning trips. However, the majority of these apps are built on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and are simply given an initial prompt that instructs them to provide help in trip planning. You can get much the same experience using a generic chatbot such as Google Gemini or Meta AI and giving it a prompt focused on trip planning. I use ChatGPT, but any good AI chatbot will work.

Finding Destinations

The first part of planning any trip is choosing a destination. An AI chatbot can be very useful in this regard. All you need to do is ask for suggestions for places to visit, along with a description of what kind of destinations you’re looking for.

The more details you can provide about what you want, the better the results will be. I asked ChatGPT for recommendations for somewhere in Europe that has beautiful sandy beaches and great food, but that isn’t too crowded. I also asked to visit two locations on my trip that are fairly close to one another.

The response gave me two suggestions. The first was Puglia and Matera in Italy, and a web search confirmed that Puglia has beautiful beaches and is relatively quiet in comparison to other parts of Italy. Matera is about an hour away, has great food, some unique places to visit, and is also relatively quiet.

All boxes checked.

The second option was Costa Brava and Girona, in Spain. Once again, research confirmed that the suggested locations in Costa Brava offered beautiful beaches and great food while being less crowded than more popular destinations. Girona was within easy reach and offered some interesting places to visit.

Overall, both suggestions were very useful. If you’re not happy with the suggestions that your AI chatbot gives you, all you need to do is ask for more, and it will generate different options. You can also add more detail to refine the suggestions.

Creating Itineraries

Once you’ve picked a location, you might want some help in deciding what to do there. AI chatbots can help to create itineraries for you. If I decided that I want to make the trip to Puglia and Matera, I could ask ChatGPT to create an itinerary for a two-day stay in Matera and include the types of things that I would and wouldn’t be interested in doing. Once again, the more detail you can give, the better your results are likely to be.

The response I got from ChatGPT was a detailed itinerary of what to do during the two days, including where to visit each morning, afternoon, and evening, and even suggestions about where to eat. Once again, a quick search seemed to indicate that the information I was given was accurate and useful, although you’d need to double-check your itinerary carefully before your trip.

Packing Advice

Something that I use ChatGPT for all the time is telling me what I need to pack whenever I go away. Whether it’s a night away, or a long vacation, it’s always hard to know exactly what you need to bring. All you need to do is give ChatGPT details of the length and type of trip that you’re making and ask for a list of everything you need to pack. You can even include the time of year, and it will take into account what the weather will be like.

The results are usually incredibly useful and include things that are all too easy to forget, such as phone chargers or medication. I’ve found that I’m far less prone to over-packing since using ChatGPT to tell me what I need.

Another useful way to use ChatGPT in your daily tasks is to help with shopping. Most of us can’t afford to let a machine make purchasing decisions for us, but AI chatbots can be very helpful in narrowing down potential purchases. Ultimately, the final decision will still be yours.

Product Suggestions

One of the simplest ways to use ChatGPT for shopping is to ask for product suggestions. For example, you might be looking for a new laptop, and have an idea of the kind of spec you’re looking for. Rather than trawling through products online, you can get ChatGPT to help offer some suggestions.

I asked for suggestions for a laptop with a screen of around 15 inches, with plenty of RAM and a decent processor to handle intensive applications, where internal storage wasn’t a huge issue, and with a budget of no more than $1,200. The response gave several useful suggestions, although one was a 14-inch laptop.

Product Comparisons

If you’ve found two great products and just can’t choose between them, an AI chatbot can really help. You can ask for a side-by-side comparison of two different products, and the chatbot will provide information about what the products have in common and what features are unique to each. You can then use this information to help inform your final decision.

Summarizing Reviews

Reading through reviews can be a tedious and confusing process. You can read lots of great reviews of a product but then read one that’s terrible and be unable to get that bad review out of your mind. An AI chatbot can summarize reviews for you so that you can get an overall impression of what the reviews say without having to read them all individually.

Ask something like “Give me an overview of the reviews for the MSI Katana 15” and the AI chatbot will give you a breakdown of what the reviews indicate. You can provide more details if you want to know what the reviews have said about a specific aspect of the product.

Other Daily Tasks That AI Chatbots Can Help With

Planning trips and shopping for products are two useful ways that AI chatbots can help you in your daily life. There are plenty of other daily tasks that can be made a little easier with the help of an AI chatbot, however.

Creating To-Do Lists

Everyone loves a good to-do list, right? The satisfaction of checking everything off makes completing all your tasks worth the effort. Making the to-do list itself can be the hardest part, however, with everything usually grinding to a halt after adding “Make a List” as the first item.

If there’s a task you want to achieve, explain what it is to your AI chatbot, and ask it to generate a to-do list for you. It will break down the task and create a to-do list of each part. For example, you can ask it to generate a to-do list for cleaning your bathroom, to ensure that you don’t miss anything.

You can even ask it to include check boxes so that you can print the list and check it off as you work.

Drafting Emails

Why write emails yourself when an AI chatbot can write them for you? You can ask it to write an email on a specific topic, give it a rough length that you want, and even ask it to write in a specific tone of voice, such as “suitable for a work email” or “intended for my grandmother.” The chatbot will then generate the text you can copy and paste into your email.

As already mentioned, relying solely on an AI chatbot that may not always be accurate is never a good idea, so make sure you read through the entire email before you send it.

Producing Cleaning Schedules

Keeping your home clean and tidy is a constant battle. A cleaning schedule can help, but the schedules you find online may not be a good match for your home or the time you have available. You can get an AI chatbot to create a personalized cleaning schedule based on your home and availability.

Create a prompt that includes the details of the rooms in your home, how long you want to spend cleaning each day, and whether there are any days you don’t want to have to clean. You can ask for a weekly schedule or a more complex one over a longer period.

The AI chatbot will produce a schedule for you, and if there are any aspects you don’t like, you can tweak them with further prompts. You can even ask the AI chatbot to create a table of your schedule that you can print out.

AI chatbots can be fun to play around with, but they can also be incredibly useful. While they can tend to hallucinate on occasion, for the most part, you can use AI chatbots to help with a wide range of daily tasks, from planning trips and shopping to writing your emails.