There’s an AI for that

A list of AI tools to try in your day-to-day work.

I reckon we’re a month or so away from artificial intelligence (AI) being embedded into all the software that we use for day-to-day work. The addition of an AI assistant or CoPilot to Microsoft Office is likely to be a significant moment.

In the meantime here are some low-cost AI tools to try out in your own day-to-day work. I say low-cost but with a price of $100-$200/year each the costs soon rack up.

Beautiful - charts and presentations - I’ve used this tool for three years. It brings artwork and designer-level skills to presentation decks, partly by forcing you to use a template, but also by suggesting how you can improve your visual presentation.

ChatGPT - idea generation - pay for the version based on the GPT-4 language set. Useful for brainstorming, the first draft of anything, and templates. It’s based on a predictive model and so will make stuff up. You have been warned.

Fireflies - contact and meeting reports - I’ve used this tool ever since Andrew Bruce Smith invited his bot to a meeting. It circulates a summary of the meeting with 15 minutes of it ending, including actions, share of voice, and sentiment.

Midjourney - images - the best of a series of applications that generates images based on a text description. Built on a Discord server and so requires a level of technical nous. The benefit is that you can see how other people are using the tool. DALL·E 2 is an alternative from OpenAI.

Otter - transcripts - like Beautiful, I’ve used this tool for several years. It is brilliant at turning audio or video interviews into a transcript that you can edit. It will also pull out key themes and topics.

Wordtune editor - editing and summaries - reductive AI is almost more useful than generative AI. This application will take long form content and summarise it page-by-page. Useful for summarising long reports or research papers. Also, it won’t make stuff up.

In a previous blog I wrote about how to experiment with the use of AI tools in your agency or communication team workflow by breaking down tasks and noticing where AI might help you work smarter or more efficiently.

Let me how you get on, and also if there are any tools that I’ve missed that you recommend.