How to automate OpenAI

It's no secret that OpenAI, when combined with automation, can deliver real value to teams across marketing, sales, customer support… the list goes on. 

It's easy to see why: Our OpenAI integration lets you pull in the power of Zapier's 6,000+ apps, so you can automate anything from generating images with DALL·E to transcribing files with OpenAI's Whisper. Let's dive into ways our OpenAI integration can help you streamline efficiency and scale your impact across your business.

Table of contents

• What's the difference between Zapier's OpenAI and ChatGPT integrations?

• For generating images

• For transcribing and translating audio files

• For summarizing online articles and emails

• For streamlining customer communication

• For content generation and marketing

• For analyzing reviews and feedback

• For product and customer support tickets 

What's the difference between Zapier's OpenAI and ChatGPT integrations?

There are a ton of different ways to use our OpenAI integration, and some of them are quite similar to our ChatGPT integration. But there are a few differences to keep in mind.

First up, the OpenAI integration uses completion models (GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct) to generate text for certain actions, like creating content or summarizing text.  

But most notably, our OpenAI integration has multiple actions that make use of OpenAI's other features, like DALLE.3 and Whisper, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. That means you can create images, pull transcriptions, and even translate audio files into other languages within your automated workflows. You can see how handy those workflows might be if you generate a lot of content for different audiences, or need to summarize lengthy meetings and share them with your team. 

On the other hand, the ChatGPT integration (GPT-3.5 turbo and GPT-4 or GPT-4o for users who've made a payment of $5 or more) is designed primarily for conversations—and has advanced analysis and reasoning capabilities across text, images, and audio. You might use the ChatGPT integration to create an assistant that can answer questions in Slack, for example. Or to analyze images such as graphs or charts. 

Ultimately, which integration you use (and maybe it's both!) will depend on your own unique use case. Here are a few OpenAI ideas to get you started:

For generating images

If you need help coming up with inspiration for certain design projects, like logos or website layouts, OpenAI's DALL·E can help you generate solid frames of reference. To kickstart any design project, pull in the power of OpenAI and prompt it to create images based on your design briefs. 

Part of the NFT rage? You can also use OpenAI's integration to produce images for NFTs with metadata and upload them to platforms like Idexo. 

For transcribing and translating audio files

Need to catch up on a crucial meeting you missed—but don't want to sit through an entire recording? Or perhaps you just want to transcribe a video file (like a product feedback interview) and share it with your team so everyone's on the same page. 

Fortunately, you can use OpenAI's Whisper to automatically transcribe files up to 25 MB. The best part? These Zaps don't just transcribe files—they can summarize them for you too. Your days of taking notes are over. 

Also need to translate these files into English? OpenAI's Whisper can do that, too. Whether you're interviewing customers across the globe, or need to translate marketing videos for your business, these Zaps have you covered:

For summarizing online content and emails

Keeping up with the major influx of information can be tricky at the best of times; sometimes it's downright impossible. If you receive hundreds of emails on a daily basis or you carry out a lot of research online, you probably wish there was a way to quickly get the gist without the manual overhead. 

Fortunately, there is. With our OpenAI integration, you can generate detailed summaries of content (like an online article or a digest of your emails) and send them to your other apps—automatically. That way, you can speed up and scale your work as you go:

For streamlining customer communication

Ever have trouble writing customer emails that strike the perfect balance between professional and friendly? Or maybe you're struggling to scale communication to a large number of prospects? 

Whatever the case, reaching out at the right time—with the right message—is key to building solid customer relationships and increasing profitability. 

Fortunately, you can use these Zaps that prompt GPT-3 to write quality messages at scale based on your customers' specific needs or a prospect's position in the sales funnel. These Zaps then trigger the appropriate outreach to your customers, be that via email or through social media, allowing you to send more prompt responses. 

For content generation and marketing  

You can also use AI and automation to streamline business-critical tasks from marketing (like lead scoring) to content (like social media posts).  

For example, you can use the OpenAI integration to analyze and prioritize prospects based on their level of interest—and then send that data to your CRM. Or you can use it to generate topic ideas and subtopics for a blog or social post—then add those to a Google Doc or your CMS.

Whatever your marketing task, these Zaps will enrich your lead data and ease the pressure of creating quality content. 

For analyzing reviews and feedback 

What your existing customers think about your company is a big deal. Whether they've submitted feedback via a form or wrote you an online review, you should examine each of these experiences individually. Determining where you need to improve and where you stand can help the growth of your business. 

Of course, analyzing dozens—or hundreds—of customer opinions is easier said than done. Fortunately, you can use AI to analyze reviews based on a positive, neutral, or negative sentiment, allowing you to get more accurate insights, faster. 

These Zaps will automatically send your customer feedback to OpenAI, analyze them with one word, then send the results to another app (like Slack or Google Sheets), where you can easily review them at a glance. 

For product and customer support tickets 

Whether you collect feature requests from your customers and save them in Jira or use a tool like Zendesk to manage customer support tickets, it's normal that these entries probably consist of a sentence or two. 

To help your product and customer support teams better address these tickets, these Zaps let you add extra context to them in the form of acceptance criteria. GPT-3 will add functional requirements, clear instructions, and any other information you or your team should know.   

The result? Faster, quality customer support. 

Take your business to the next level with OpenAI

No matter your role or industry, it's increasingly clear that AI is changing the way we work—for the better. 

Whether you're using AI to streamline action items after meetings or you're using it to scale customer support queries, this integration can improve the quality, speed, and efficiency of your output. And this is just the start of what you can do with OpenAI and Zapier. Check out our App Directory to see what you can do next.

This article was originally published in March 2023. It was most recently updated in May 2024.