The Week in AI (AI Tools Edition)

Practical AI Tools to Boost Your Productivity

Welcome to another edition of The Week in AI, your guide to the latest news and developments in the world of artificial intelligence. This week we’re taking a look at some of the most useful AI tools that are worth integrating into your daily workflow.

Anthropic's Claude for Summarizing Long Content

One of the handiest AI tools mentioned is Anthropic's Claude. What makes Claude stand out is its large context window of 100,000 tokens compared to GPT-3's mere 16,000. This allows Claude to summarize extremely long research papers, PDFs, and online articles with ease.

To demonstrate, a 15 page AI research paper titled "Iterative Multi-Granular Image Editing Using Diffusion Models" was inputted into Claude. Claude provided bullet points clearly explaining the key aspects of the complex paper in simple terms. When further prompted to explain the significance of the research in a way a 5 year old could understand, Claude came up with an analogy of drawing a picture of a cat, then selectively erasing and redrawing parts like the head and hand without messing up the rest of the picture. This creativity and simplification makes Claude a hugely valuable tool for digesting dense, complex information.

Perplexity AI Chrome Extension

Another neat AI tool mentioned is Perplexity, a Chrome extension that lets you chat with any website you're currently browsing. It can summarize webpages, answer questions about the content, and even search entire sites to find specific information or tools.

For example, when on a long blog post Perplexity was able to summarize it into a concise paragraph after being asked. When visiting the site FutureTools.io, Perplexity was able to suggest AI tools a real estate agent could use when queried. This ability to have an AI assistant instantly provide tailored information about whatever you're browsing online makes Perplexity a browser extension worth checking out.

Taplio for Building Your Personal Brand

Taplio is an AI-powered platform designed to help you boost your personal brand, particularly on LinkedIn. It generates highly shareable posts, carousels, and content tailored to you and your interests.

Some of Taplio's key features include:

- An AI post generator with creative hooks and different writing styles

- A carousel generator that can turn your YouTube videos into shareable LinkedIn posts

- The ability to improve and expand on your own posts with AI

- LinkedIn sidebar tools showing your followers, profile views, and top posts

- AI-powered comment suggestions so you always know what to say

While intended for LinkedIn, the content can be repurposed for other social platforms too. Overall, Taplio is a game changer for establishing yourself as an industry thought leader online.

Enhanced Speech by Adobe

For anyone who needs to edit and improve audio quality, Enhanced Speech by Adobe is an extremely useful free tool. It uses AI to significantly clean up low quality audio from mediocre mics or phone recordings.

To demonstrate, a sample audio clip clearly recorded on an iPhone from a distance was run through Enhanced Speech. The difference pre and post-processing was night and day. The final audio sounded crisp, clear, and professional. So if you ever need to fix up poor audio quality, this AI tool should be your first stop.

ElevenLabs AI Voice Generator

While Enhanced Speech improves existing audio, ElevenLabs can create new audio in anyone's voice. This opens up limitless possibilities for content creation.

You can turn text into podcasts or videos that sound like yourself or anyone else. You can also fix tiny audio bits in a recording by generating new audio samples in the speaker's voice then seamlessly replacing the old audio.

ElevenLab's free tier allows generating 3 custom voices and 10,000 characters per month. For only $5/month you get unlimited personal and commercial use. If you create lots of content, ElevenLabs is an AI tool that can save huge amounts of time while also opening new creative doors.

Adobe Firefly for Image Generation

Adobe Firefly features Generative Fill, an AI capability that edits images for you. This can be used to tweak stock photos to better suit your needs.

For example, a stock photo of a newscaster was edited to make them hold a microphone. Then with another click, Firefly edited a top hat onto their head. It even automatically removed imperfections in the generated images.

While it may take some trial and error to get the desired look, this tool makes easy work of customizing images to your specifications. It's a lot faster than editing the images manually.

Feedly Leo for Staying On Top of Your Industry

For anyone who needs to keep up with the latest news and developments in their field, Feedly Leo is an AI-powered news curation service that filters out the noise and delivers only the most relevant content to you.

After providing keywords related to your interests, Feedly Leo monitors millions of sources and presents you with articles, blog posts, Tweets, and more tailored precisely to your needs.

Over time as you indicate what content you like and don't like, it learns your preferences and continuously improves the relevance of what information it feeds you. For power users and industry experts, Feedly Leo is a perfect tool to free up time and ensure you never miss crucial news.

MyMind for Organizing Research

MyMind is essentially a supercharged bookmarking system powered by AI. When you save content related to your work and research interests, MyMind automatically tags it based on the content.

This makes rediscovering and searching your past content incredibly easy. Need to pull together research on a specific topic? Just search for it in MyMind and all your references on the subject appear in seconds.

It's able to hold images, notes, tweets, articles, PDFs, and more. If you do research-intensive work, MyMind is a game changing tool for organizing vast amounts of reference materials for easy access later.

Google Drive's New AI Capabilities

The final set of AI tools mentioned are the recently added AI features in Google Drive. Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail now have AI writing assistants built right in to help generate and improve content.

For example, Google Sheets can now instantly create customized spreadsheet templates for meal plans, workout trackers, and more. Google Docs can generate outlines and rewrite content in different styles. And Gmail can help write emails by providing appropriately worded responses for accepting/declining invites and other common scenarios.

These AI writing tools integrate directly into software people use every day. They provide effortless assistance for a wide variety of everyday tasks.

The Main Takeaway

The common thread among all these AI tools is their practical utility for specific use cases. While flashy AI like DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT get all the hype, the unsexy AI presented in this article is more likely to become indispensable to your day-to-day work and productivity.

So if you've been curious how to actually integrate AI into your life in meaningful ways, these are some solid tools to get you started. As AI capabilities continue advancing while also becoming more accessible, we can expect many more AI-powered tools that make our lives easier to emerge in the coming years.