Integrating AI into Windows (a low-tech approach with AutoHotKey)

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could press a shortcut and ask ChatGPT about something you see on your screen? Or select a bit of text in any application, press a shortcut, and have ChatGPT explain what it means?

In this post I’ll show you how to set up these two interactions.

To be clear, what I describe below doesn’t allow you to achieve anything you couldn’t do before, it just makes it easier; it makes it feel like your favourite Chatbot is integrated right into the operating system, rather than having to copy/paste between windows.

These instructions are for Windows, Chrome and ChatGPT, but you can apply the same logic to get the job done with different tools.

Setup

AutoHotKey

First, install AutoHotKey (apologies if you don’t like doing that sort of thing, I too avoided it for a few decades).

This is a tool that allows you to write scripts that run in response to a keyboard shortcut.

Next, create a file anywhere (e.g. your documents folder) called shortcuts.ahk. Leave it empty for now.

This file will define the keyboard shortcuts and the scripts that run in response to them. To make the file ‘active’ you can double click…