Having issues with Airtable formulas? Try Hint GPT Airtable formula extension!

Greg_F · ‎Mar 08, 2023

Hi there!

I have built this AI feature so that Airtable team doesn't have to spend time building it 😁.

Type what you want the formula to do, press the "Hint GPT" button and get the formula suggestion - directly inside the Formula field:

How did the additional button show up there? It is a Chrome Extension (you can download it here) which uses at the back (obviously) ChatGPT API, with some prompt engineering to get you just the Airtable formula.

It seems to be doing pretty decent job for use cases like "Calculate number of days between now and Deadline field" or event more advanced like "Check if emails in Email field have correct format using REGEX_MATCH() function."

I have been testing it for a few days and even being well versed in formulas - a few times it was for me to ask "extract ID from the end of the URL" than to start brain up to think of formula 🤣.

The ChatGPT formula hints also SPECTACULARLY FAIL on some attempts or produce complete gibberish, but hey, luckily we have plenty of talented people on the forum if you get stuck with more complex formula cases.

This is more of a proof of concept, you can see the source code on Github and if you would like to play with it you can download the compiled extension from here and load to Chrome.

Here is a demo video of how it works (or doesn't work):

Let me know what you think!

Bill_French · ‎Mar 12, 2023

Great video! This is turning out to be a very helpful thread on this topic.

Frank_Gannon1 · ‎Apr 25, 2023

Great work! I'm too novice to make quick sense of your code, but I'd love to see this connected to a list of valid airtable functions (suggestion of unsupported functions was a frequent problem for me in the chat interface) and maybe even some additional docs in a vector database.

Greg_F · ‎Apr 25, 2023

@Frank_Gannon1 actually it works decent enough for me to accelerate making formulas.

It does fail spectacularly as last time when I asked it to create a slug from article name and for 2 min straight it was spitting out SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(.... but on the next attempt I told it to use REGEX for slug and it came up with a nice formula!

I am actually working on making use of embeddings and vectors in database - I do have it principally working but too busy with projects right now to convert it into something usable and accessible. Hopefully will carve out some time soon.