How I Built a Custom GPT to Interpret and Answer Questions About my HOA Governing Documents

Exploring the realm of custom GPTs opens up a world of possibilities that you might not be aware of yet. For those who haven’t dived into this feature, you’re truly missing out on a significant enhancement to your Chat GPT experience. You can find and access your custom GPTs here.

I created my most recent GPT to help me sift through my HOA documents—a task anyone who has attempted can attest to being frustratingly cumbersome. My HOA is governed by three key documents: the articles of incorporation, CCRs, and Bylaws.

The first issue I ran into was my HOA documents were scanned images, not text. I wrote a Python script that utilizes Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert these scanned images into readable text. You can find more details on that script here. Once the documents were OCR-processed, I could seamlessly upload them into Chat GPT for analysis and navigation.

The next step in creating the custom GPT is giving it a Name, Description, and Instructions on what it does.

That’s pretty much it. Here is the completed GPT.

There are 3 levels of security for a custom GPT, for yourself, anyone with a link, or Everyone.

That’s it, now let’s ask some questions.