The wave of hype and investment around AI is bringing with it an ever-growing list of new startups, tools, and websites designed to make use of the newfound availability of LLM models. Some of these new tools are not great, but some of them are fantastic bits of constrained functionality that make truly great use of AI to improve your productivity. We've been following along, and here are some of my favorite tools for improving your productivity with AI.
4 ChatGPT
This one goes without saying, but it's worth thinking about
Now this is clearly the obvious one, but there are some things to consider here. ChatGPT can be useful for all the things most of us are using it for day to day, but it's also great for a range of tasks you might not have considered. This includes things like writing cover letters or using ChatGPT as a learning resource to generate test questions and answers. We've covered several times a range of 'alternative' uses for ChatGPT that you might not have considered, so it's worth having a look through some of the suggestions and seeing if they can help your workflow.
There are other features to explore here, including the ability for users to create and use their own GPTs, allowing pre-prompted models to meet a specific goal or task, and the new GPT-4o. Whether it's using ChatGPT as a text-to-speech service, for translations, or to generate boilerplate code or document templates, there are plenty of uses we've all been missing every day; so take a second when you're doing a repetitive task to test out if ChatGPT can do it for you.
3 Perplexity AI
The one-stop shop for AI search
You might not have heard of Perplexity AI, but you should — especially if you're paying for a ChatGPT subscription just to make use of it for up-to-date web searching. Perplexity AI is a search-focused, multi-language model with a range of integrated tools for making search great again. It's got a free and pro tier — although the pro tier grants you access to multiple models including GPT-4 and Claude — as well as allowing you to fine-tune your search into a range of focuses. These themes help refine your results and include things like a Reddit focus and a Wolfram Alpha focus to generate more relevant results.
Perplexity results also include videos from around the web, and it'll prompt you with follow-up questions in the same way Google would. There's even the option to attach images, videos, PDFs, and files to your search to enhance it further, or profile a short profile about yourself to localize results and highlight areas more likely to be relevant to you. It's a truly great search tool that makes use of multiple models at once to generate the best results and provide the most succinct and relevant answers.
If you're logged in (SSO is supported), you'll get up to five Pro searches a day for free, though we've found the free version is generous if you're not regularly searching via files.
ChatGPT's Mac app works like Spotlight and it's better than Siri
We got access to ChatGPT's Mac application, and it works just like Spotlight does... and, of course, it's better than Siri.
2 VideoHighlight.com
No one wants to sit through an hour-long video
There are plenty of content types on the internet that best suit long, droning video formats or lectures. This is valid and is sometimes a necessity of the content (writing up a long lecture into an article, for example, is far more time-consuming and difficult for the author.) But you might find yourself often wanting to extract the key points or succinctly browse to the relevant parts of a long video without scrubbing through the whole thing. YouTube can generate a transcript for videos, but this often isn't much more helpful for a long video.
This is where VideoHighlight comes in. It's one of my favorite tools for taking in a long, complex YouTube video and generating a succinct series of summaries. It'll break your video down into natural sections, pull out key information, summarize it and provide you with timestamps to go and watch it yourself. The effect of this is that VideoHighlight is more than a summarizing tool - it allows you to find and watch the area of the video you're most interested in without a long process of scrubbing through. Some other nice features include a full transcript, and the ability to interact with the content via chat.
The summaries are pretty good here, if sometimes too succinct for complex topics (the above screenshot is a very succinct description of a MIT algorithmics lecture.) But again, how information about the video is presented encourages you to use timestamps to watch the relevant section yourself. VideoHighlights.com is certainly a great tool to have in your locker, especially when researching.
1 Stunning.so
A much-hyped way to make beautiful websites quickly and easily
Stunning.so is a great way to generate social media posts, emails and complete websites easily using AI. It's a paid service, but you can try it out for free without needing a credit card.
Once you're set up on Stunning, you can use their website chat feature to start building a website. You'll be asked to describe your website, and the chatbot will come back with a series of clarifying questions. I tested this out by building a website for my personal online presence and found that it asked questions from what language to stick to and the general theme to specific questions about the content of the site - including the tone and style I normally write in. I was even offered a color palette to choose from. Once you've finished answering questions, your website will be generated (though only after approving the color scheme.)
You'll be given a range of pages across the site, and most of the content will be filled in for you. You'll have the option to then tweak everything from sections, pages, and the text content of your site, to tweak the theme or other settings. You can also ask the AI to tweak things for you, like making your site more friendly and more formal, adding more emojis, or writing up content.
This is a great way to get started with building a professional site for everything from your online freelance business to a CV quickly. Even if you don't end up using stunning.so ultimately, to host and run the site (which they can do as well), it's a great source of ideas, inspiration, and design help to get started with. I was able to get up and running on an admittedly not perfect, though easily customizable site, in under 10 minutes.
The list of AI tools is growing daily
While the likes of ChatGPT and Claude might have been failing to continue with the lofty expectations set for them, and Google is blundering around with generative AI search results, plenty of smaller startups are making sensible and constrained use of AI to build out great tools to solve specific problems. Some of these tools are fantastic, capable of quickly and easily doing anything from summarizing content to generating websites on the fly. I'm a big fan of these smaller tools, and until large generative AI models start living up to the AGI hype, these smaller tools are where a lot of the real value (both for individuals and businesses) lies with AI.