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1. Visualize Your Career Options

Try: Google’s Career Dreamer

What it is: A free tool for exploring jobs adjacent to yours. See a map of professional fields related to your interests.

How to use it: Start by typing in a current or previous role. Or name a job that interests you. Use up to five words. You can also name a specific organization or industry, if you have one in mind.

Career Dreamer asks what work activities interest you, then maps related career paths. Pick one at a time to explore.

You can then browse actual job openings. Refine the search based on location, company size, or other factors you care about.

Example: I’m not job hunting, but I tested out the service by typing in “journalist, writer and educator” as roles and then “journalism and education” as my industries of interest. 📺 Watch my short video demo below👇

Why it’s useful: I like that Career Dreamer suggests a range of relevant fields, then summarizes what a typical day in those jobs might be like. It also suggests skills you’ll develop, and other jobs that might follow on your career path.

Next step: After exploring potential paths and looking at available jobs, use Gemini for further career planning. Read my guide to Gemini

Here’s how: Use Career Dreamer’s copy and paste feature to grab your career interests and skills to your clipboard. You can then jump to Gemini (screenshot below) to paste that material as a summary prompt into a chat about your career plans.

2. Figure Out What You Actually Want from Work

Try: Gemini Gem — Career Guide

What it is: Gemini Gems are customized AI assistants. They are AI models tailored to be helpful in a specific context. One of the template Gems that Google created is a career guide. You can copy the Career Guide gem to make your own editable version, then adapt it for your own professional interests.

How to use it: Start by conducting a thorough “soul-searching” reverse interview with Gemini. Rather than Gemini answering your questions, task it to ask you the questions. Tell it to nudge you to dig deeper into your own preferences, attitudes, objectives and needs. Then have it summarize what you’ve said. You’ll get better at understanding and articulating your own career perspectives.

Try this career self-interview prompt: Give this prompt to Gemini or another AI tool of your choice to conduct a reverse interview. As Gemini — or another AI assistant— interviews you, you’ll develop a richer understanding of your own job preferences.

Next steps: Use your Gemini Gem AI assistant to clarify your strengths and career objectives, and for help developing your search strategy.

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What I'm reading on Shortform this week

Shortform has helped me get inside more books. I use it for books I haven’t had time to read. I also open it to rediscover ideas from books I finished years ago but have already started to forget. It’s like having a smart friend sum up a book so you really understand what it’s about, beyond the surface.

One to check out on Shortform: Make it Stick, an excellent book I’m re-reading (screenshot above) about how to teach so your students remember. Instead of having to re-read the full book for 10 hours, I can remind myself of the key insights in a half hour. When I’m deciding between books on a new subject, Shortform helps me make a quick decision by previewing the books’ key ideas.

Shortform also now has podcast and article guides. Those help give you the gist of a long interview or a sprawling article.

If your reading list sometimes overwhelms you, as it does for me, it’s worth a try.

Wonder Tools readers get a free trial + 25% off the annual plan👇

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3. Research Potential Employers

Try: ChatGPT Deep Research

How Deep Research is different: Unlike typical AI chat queries, which yield responses of less than a page, Deep Research enables AI models to autonomously develop exhaustive reports. Some are 30 to 40 pages. The Deep Research agent searches the Web and examines hundreds of research sites. It returns a complete report, of the kind a researcher might spend days compiling. You also get citations and links to verify the info and explore more on your own.

See 9 ways to use Deep Research.

You can use these personalized reports to learn more about industries of interest. Or you can narrow your scope and investigate specific aspects of companies that intrigue you.

How to use it: Toggle on “Deep Research” in ChatGPT. Type a detailed query. Describe your specific interests, skills, and the kinds of organizations you're curious about. Request a comprehensive table of relevant companies with detailed information about culture, growth trajectories, or whatever else.

Example: Here’s a journalism industry query for Deep Research you can adapt.

Benefits: Learn valuable context about companies you may apply to, and discover new organizations you didn’t know about. Use this research to tailor your applications and to prepare for interviews by understanding industry trends.

Pricing note: You get several free Deep Research queries a month on ChatGPT’s free plan, or more on a paid plan. Gemini offers a good free Deep Research alternative, as does Claude. Perplexity also offers free Deep Research reports. They are faster, but not as thorough.

Alternative tools: Exa’s Websets is a powerful, pricey, pro AI search tool that organizes results into a detailed table. It can draw on datasets like these, helping you identify companies you might want to target, based on your own criteria.

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4. Keep Your Search On Track

Try: ChatGPT Projects

What it’s for: Set up a dedicated AI folder for your career search. Provide instructions about what kind of help you’d like. Attach relevant files like your resume, interest list, or research reports.

Once you’ve provided that context, you’ll never again have to re-prompt ChatGPT about what you’re looking for, or how you want to be helped.

How to use it: Try having it guide you in building a realistic timeline for preparing applications, sending follow-ups, and reaching out for informational interviews. Ask it to assist you in designing a structured daily job search agenda. If you’re applying to many different positions, with lots of tasks to juggle, it can help to organize your plans.

Advanced tactic: You can upload examples of your past outreach or other writings as project resources. That will enable the AI assistant to help you draft new emails in your own style, whether you’re letting people know you’re open to new opportunities or reaching out to new contacts. You can even connect the project to Google Sheets or Excel to keep your tracking list updated.

Organize your career search tasks: ChatGPT’s “Scheduled Tasks” feature can help by sending you custom reminders. That could include an automated daily reminder of specific tasks to complete to maintain momentum. You can even ask it to periodically send encouraging messages.

Free alternative: ChatGPT’s Projects require a paid plan, $20/month. For a free alternative, you can create a limited number of free Claude Projects, or create a Gemini Gem with similar functionality.

5. Sharpen Your Applications

Try: Claude Projects

What it does: Gives you personalized AI assistance to help polish any materials you’re creating. Give it specific instructions and upload background documents to ensure that it understands your preferences, strengths, and style.

I have Claude Projects set up to assist with many of the things I work on, from new classes I’m developing to volunteering projects. Here’s why I find Claude Projects so useful.

How to use it: Upload past cover letters, resumes, lists of accomplishments, awards, vision statements, or anything else you’ve created.

In your project instructions, tell the AI to respect your authentic voice while providing you constructive criticism.

• Ask for feedback on writing you’re submitting. Specify what will be most useful for you. For instance, ask for grammar, spelling, and syntax suggestions, or warnings about exaggerations, cliches, or jargon.

• Ask what additional information you should consider including based on a particular job description.

• Warning: submitting purely AI-composed material can weaken your application. Your text may sound artificial and lack soul. That’s why I’m recommending using AI for critical feedback, not to replace your writing.

Alternatives

• ChatGPT’s Projects & Custom GPTs have similar functionality. You can add resource files and instructions to adjust how the AI assistants support you.

• Perplexity Spaces also allow you to organize prompt threads and add custom documents and instructions.

• Gemini Gems noted above, offer a free alternative. I prefer the quality of Claude’s responses and some of its features, like a custom editing style I’ve trained it to use. Google also just launched Gemini Notebooks, which I’ll soon test.

6. Rehearse Interviews Out Loud

Try: ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode

How to use it: Brainstorm interview questions specific to your target role, industry, and even the particular company you're applying to. Then practice answering these questions using voice mode for a realistic simulation.

Read 7 ways to use Advanced Voice Mode

Ask for detailed feedback as you rehearse your answers. Prompt your voice assistant to highlight strong points and suggest areas for improvement. Ask it to be as specific as possible and to help you practice strengthening your responses.

Ask it to help you prepare for whatever interview context you expect to encounter, from technical questions and case studies to fact-based questions or casual, open-ended lunch conversations.

Pricing: Full access to ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode requires a paid plan, but free users can access a daily preview of advanced voice mode powered by a model slightly less advanced than the top paid models.

Alternatives

• Microsoft Copilot Voice is free. Choose from eight voices. You can even adjust the voice speed. I like Wave, with his British-sounding accent, at 1.25 speed.

• Gemini Live from Google is also an excellent voice AI assistant. Like ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, it can even use computer vision to comment on something you show it. Initiate a conversation while pointing your phone camera at a company’s leadership org chart, for example, or public balance sheet, or a list of questions you’ve handwritten.

Bonus tip: If your job search involves speaking or understanding multiple languages, you can use these voice models to practice speaking or listening in any number of tongues. It’s a great way to practice live language skills.

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7. Negotiate Your Salary

Try: Deep Research (from Perplexity, Gemini, or ChatGPT)

How to use it: Research average salaries for similar positions in your industry, accounting for variables like location, company size, and experience level. Ask for a salary table you can reference when negotiating. You can also research relevant benefits, company culture, and other factors.

Compare Deep Research salary reports

I’m not job hunting, but I generated these reports as examples, so you can compare them side by side:

• Perplexity Report + original Perplexity thread

• ChatGPT Report

• Gemini Report

Practice negotiating: Use the aforementioned voice AI tools to role-play negotiations or to prepare for difficult benefits conversations. Practice responding to everything from a dream offer to one below your market value.

Two Bonus Ideas

• Put together a video reel. Try Google Vids or Captions to create a little video about what makes you distinct.

• Make a great deck. Gamma, Beautiful.ai, Pitch, Canva, and the new Chronicle are helpful for turning talking points into polished slide presentations. You can even create surprisingly strong slides about your qualifications with NotebookLM and the brand new Claude Design.

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Catch up on Part 1 👇

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12pm: Midday Break

Healthy Minds 🧠

This free app helps me with mindfulness. The 5-10 minute audio lessons work well as walking meditations. I sometimes also use Headspace or Calm for meditation or focus music.

Libby 📚

I rely on Libby for free library audiobooks. I listen when walking to lunch or commuting. Here are tools I rely on for finding great books.

Lunch

• Resy and OpenTable 🍱 for quick reservations nearby

• The Infatuation for opinionated local restaurant recommendations

• Too Good To Go for trying heavily discounted (66% off) dishes from local restaurants, bakeries, and juice bars. The fixed-price mystery bags reduce restaurant waste. Sometimes you get a delicious bargain, but the quality varies. I’ve occasionally gotten a weird bread or a bland pastry.

• MealPal When I don’t bring my own lunch, I like MealPal, a lunch subscription service. Local restaurants offer one dish a day as part of the subscription, which costs about $6/day. I like the variety: you can choose which restaurant to try on any given day. It’s available so far in 12 cities.

1-3pm: Preparing to Teach

After lunch, I continue developing teaching plans or work on other school-related projects for my job as Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. (More of my thinking in a recent Columbia Journalism Review interview).

Craft 📄

My go-to for creating visually engaging digital handouts. It’s easy to use and works wonderfully on mobile or desktop. See my post on why Craft is so useful.

Wispr Flow, Text Blaze and Raycast

• I often use Wispr Flow to type with my voice. It works in any app. I just hold the function key and talk.

• When I do type with my hands I use Text Blaze keyboard shortcuts to add snippets into my email and documents. It works for email addresses and signatures, search prompts, and phrases I type a lot.

• Raycast also works well for these shortcuts. Why I rely on Raycast.

Notes by Hand 📝

I like writing notes away from my laptop periodically to get my eyes off the screen and to change my brain mode. I alternate between:

• I use a Rocketbook reusable notebook for lists and reminders.

• A giant whiteboard helps me draw connections and play around with ideas away from the glowing distractions of my screens.

• My reMarkable Paper Pro tablet hosts notes I will return to repeatedly. What works for me, paper vs. digital

Keynote for Slides

This Mac presentation software works reliably offline or on for in-person and remote classes and workshops I lead. Keynote is now part of Apple’s new Creator Studio, a package of software that includes video and image editing tools.

I haven’t found the Keynote AI features useful so far, but the basic software is excellent for designing and delivering compelling slides.

Pricing: Keynote is free with any Mac. I wouldn’t recommend the subscription upgrade, at $129/year or $30/year for students and educators, unless you’re a heavy user of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, or the other pro software tools.

iA Presenter

I vary slide apps to keep things interesting. I sometimes write a lesson outline and paste that text into iA Presenter, which turns it into clean, typographically sharp slides. Like Keynote, it works offline. For more on why this app is so useful, watch the demo video or read my post.

Kahoot, Padlet, and Slido 🤔

I rely on this trio of teaching tools to power activities that promote active learning in classes or workshops — rather than passive listening. Here are more of my favorite apps for teaching.

Time Out for Screen Breaks⏳

I set this app to remind me to give my eyes a screen break every 15 minutes. It pulses over the screen to nudge me to stretch or look out the window. The Raycast Focus Mode also helps, blocking email and distractions during short, focused, deep work sprints.

3-5pm: Meetings 👥

I try to schedule meetings for the late afternoon to conclude the day with collaboration, after starting with more creative work.

Granola for Summaries🤖

Granola weaves my own notes into its summary, sends no bot into my Zooms, and lets me search across meetings for tasks, patterns, or insights. My full post about it👇 describes 10 of the features, along with tips, limitations, and alternatives.

Camo for Webcam Customization

Camo lets me modify my camera to zoom in, adjust lighting, or add overlays during video calls. It also lets me use my phone or other external cameras. Prezi Video and Airtime enable lower-thirds, annotations, and overlay visuals I occasionally use for presentations.

Sony UX570 Voice Recorder for Interviews

My reliable backup for recording audio. I like that it doesn't require an open laptop or running phone. I often transcribe the audio files with MacWhisper.

6pm: After work

Snipd for listening to podcasts on my commute

This smart podcast app lets me preview podcasts and save highlights to my notes. I triple-tap my AirPods to save my favorite moments to Readwise, a service that acts as a repository for highlights from my online reading, Kindle books, and other apps I use.

A recent favorite: The history of Trader Joe’s episode of the excellent Acquired podcast, which features multi-hour deep dives into remarkable companies.

Sony Noise Cancelling Headphones

I splurged on the $460 WH-100XM6 headphones to block noise on the exhaustingly loud New York City subway. I had my previous pair (WH-1000XM3) for seven years, so hopefully this investment will prove equally durable. I use them for commuting and focus music.

Nex for Games and Exercise Breaks

I love playing the sports and workout games on this family video game system. They’re all active games played with your body, not your thumbs. I play solo or with my wife & daughters. It’s like a next-generation Nintendo Wii, which we also still play (especially the balance board games).

To get away from screens, we also play these family tabletop games.

11pm: Bedtime 🌙

Glocusent Rechargeable Reading Light

This tiny $13 light clips onto any book. The battery lasts for months.

Yogasleep Dohm White Noise Machine

This $50 gadget masks random night sounds, making it easier to sleep.

Peakeep “Invisible” Alarm Clock

I turn off the display on this $13 bedside clock so it doesn’t glow at night. I tap the top to see the time if I need to. Its morning alarm lets me keep my tempting phone out of the bedroom.

That’s my noon to night kit. What tools carry you through your day?

What’s One Tool You Recommend? Leave a Comment👇

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Bottom line: Granola has transcribed and summarized nearly 1,000 of my meetings since I began using it in September 2024. It helps me keep track of what I’ve learned and what I’ve promised to do.

What it does: It’s a software download, not a bot, so it’s not visible in meetings. It just runs on my computer or phone. I connected my Google Calendar. Now it auto-detects my meetings and opens automatically. I can use it to record in-person meetings, or anything online: Zoom, Google Meet, or even Substack Live.

How it’s different: Unlike other bots that spit out a generic summary, Granola gives me a typing window for my own note-taking. That means I can include my own thoughts and highlight what I find most important. Afterwards, I can search for patterns across my meetings, projects and presentations.

Pricing: Granola’s free plan includes unlimited meeting summaries and access to 30 days of meeting history. I pay $14/month for a full archive and AI integrations.

Cheat-Sheet: Here’s a PDF summary of this post for easy reference.

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👇10 ways Granola stands out

1. Write your own notes while AI fills in details

Most AI note-takers give me only the AI’s version of what happened. Granola shows my own notes alongside the live transcript. I can refer back to either.

Knowing I’ll have a thorough record frees me to focus on listening. I can be more present when I don’t have to worry about jotting down each detail.

I type my own most important observations, priorities, and reactions during a meeting. The AI assistant fills in other details. That ensures I’m not reliant on a generic synopsis. My own emphasis and perspective help shape the summary.

• Smart design: After a meeting, the summary weaves in my own points in black, distinct from the gray AI summary notes. I can easily distinguish my own material. I can later revisit my own notes or the AI-assisted summary.

• Zoom in for detail: I like being able to click on any summary line to see a more detailed view of that section of the transcript.

2. Catch up mid-meeting

This is the feature that surprised me the most. During a meeting, I can ask Granola to summarize what’s been said, or to catch me up on what I missed.

This saved me recently. I was in a live session. My mind wandered. I didn’t hear what a couple of people said. I asked Granola for a concise recap of the last few minutes. It caught me up while continuing to transcribe. I like that I can also scan back manually through the live transcription while a meeting progresses.

3. Take private notes without a bot joining your call 🔒

Granola captures only text. It transcribes in real time but doesn’t store audio or video files. Some people don’t want to be recorded video-wise, or they don’t want their voice recorded. Granola works well for that, because it stores only text.

That’s a deliberate design choice. As CEO Chris Pedregal told me when I interviewed him for Fast Company, the value is in useful notes, not in retaining audio.

The tradeoff: you can’t go back and listen to verify a quote, or hear the emotion in someone’s voice. If that matters for your work, pick an alternative below.

Open a typical AI note-taker and you’ll see a bot listed as a meeting participant and a robotic rectangle in your video window. Some people find these bots intrusive.

Granola doesn’t join your meeting. It runs on your computer (or phone). Nobody else in the meeting needs to know it’s there, though I recommend getting people’s consent.

Your data is protected. Granola is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, which basically means an independent auditor has checked that the company has safeguards to protect sensitive info. And you can delete parts of a transcript.

4. Take it to conferences, workshops, or doctor visits

Granola is useful beyond work meetings. Here are some ways I’ve used it:

• Learn from conferences and workshops. Capture notes from panels and talks. Later, search across all the sessions. “Which speakers mentioned AI regulation?” or “What books did speakers recommend?” You get a searchable archive of an entire event.

• Catch up with online courses and webinars. I use Granola when I’m hosting or watching a Substack Live. If I have to step away, I can catch up. Or I can search across a series. “Remind me which tactics we covered.”

• Capture medical or personal appointments. Ask for permission to use Granola for therapy sessions, vet visits, or doctor appointments. When you later forget what the expert said about dosage or next steps, ask Granola.

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The Smarter Way to Read More

There are more great books than any of us will ever finish. I made peace with that, though I still wish I could read more. So I found a tool that helps.

Shortform has helped me get inside more books. I use it for books I haven’t had time to read, and to rediscover ideas from books I finished years ago but have already started to forget.

What sets it apart is that it’s powered by human writers and editors, not AI summaries. You get substantive analysis, useful examples, and quotes from the book. You also get recommendations for related titles and a one-page overview. It’s like having a smart friend sum it up for you.

A few to check out on Shortform: a guide to What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, by Laura Vanderkam (I’m a big fan) and Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin (also an author I admire). Shortform also has podcast and article guides to get the gist of long interviews or sprawling posts.

If your reading list ever creates anxiety for you, as it does for me, it’s worth a look.

Wonder Tools readers get a free trial + $50 off the annual plan. →

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5. Search across meetings by person or company 🔍

Granola organizes meetings by people and organizations. I can select someone’s name and search across all of our conversations. Or I can search through discussions I’ve had with people at Dorot, where I volunteer.

This is useful for questions like: What did we agree to last month? What themes keep coming up? What did I promise that I haven’t followed up on?

You can also create folders for specific projects or events. If I’m attending or teaching workshops, I can search across all of those sessions. I can use natural language rather than hunting for keywords.

Tip: If you’re a writer or give presentations, ask Granola to compile key points or ideas you’ve shared in past meetings or presentations. It’s helpful for exploring and building on your own material. Instead of using AI to think for you, use it to help you organize and make more of your own ideas.

6. Record in-person meetings w/ a phone or laptop 📱

I’ve been to public events where I wanted to remember what was discussed. The iPhone app is great. Same account, no separate setup.

Granola uses a device’s built-in mic. I’ve been surprised that works well even when I’m not sitting near the person presenting. I can even transcribe and summarize outgoing phone calls, with permission, if I initiate the call from the Granola app.

Other recorders I’ve tried occasionally crash when I get a call or open other apps. Granola has been consistently reliable, even for long meetings.

Available on: Mac, Windows, and iOS. There’s no Android app yet, though I expect that will launch later this year.

7. Analyze meetings with “recipes”

Recipes are prompt templates built specifically for your meetings. Instead of recreating the same query every time, you save it once and reuse it. To use these, open up an individual Granola meeting note, or query a folder or your whole library of notes. (Screenshot)

A few I recommend:

• List recent to-dos. Scans recent meetings for tasks mentioned. I recently caught a missing follow-up this way. Someone asked me for a logo. I forgot to put it on my to-do list. The recipe surfaced it.

• Prep next meeting. Reminds me about prior conversations I’ve had with someone I’m meeting, including any relevant follow-up questions.

• Coach me. Analyzes my comments and suggests what I might do differently.

• YouTube description. I created this for workshops I lead. Some of them end up on my YouTube channel. Granola has the full text, so the recipe helps me generate a description.

Browse the public library of recipes and grab ones that interest you. There are special recipes for sales, marketing, customer interviews, and other common business use-cases.

I wish there were more recipes designed for writers, teachers, creatives, and other non-business use-cases. Fortunately, it’s easy to create your own recipes. It’s as simple as writing a prompt.

8. Give Claude or ChatGPT access to your Granola notes

I upgraded to the paid plan so I can give other AI assistants access to my meeting history through the Model Context Protocol. MCP provides a simple way to link Granola to AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT.

Why this is so useful: I can ask Claude to cross-reference what I’ve talked about in my presentations with what I’ve published. Claude can also help me generate dashboards, spreadsheets, handouts, and reports from material I’ve presented. All of that is possible because Claude has access to my newsletter archive, via a tool called Mizal, and my presentation transcripts, via Granola.

9. Share meeting notes others can explore

You can share a link to a Granola summary with anyone. The person on the other end doesn’t have to log in or have a Granola account. They can read the summary and even search the transcript. They won’t see your private queries, and you won’t see theirs. You can also share an entire folder with a colleague or team, or even a workspace with lots of folders.

Example: Here’s a Granola summary of my most recent Wonder Tools Live workshop. For context, this is one of the live monthly sessions I host for paid subscribers. I show how I’m using tools, new ways to use AI, and tips on working productively and creatively.

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10. Start free with unlimited meetings

• Students at accredited universities in the US, UK, and Canada get Granola free for a year.

• Startups with fewer than 30 employees who have raised pre-seed or seed funding also get a free year.

• The paid plan is $14 a month. That’s worth it for me for unlimited access to past meeting summaries, being able to query my notes from other AI tools like Claude, and access to the strongest AI models for analysis.

• The free plan limits you to 30 days of meetings. That’s not an issue unless you often reference old summaries or need to access your notes from other AI tools.

Try Granola free for a month with this link.

How to make the most of Granola

• Create “personal hashtags.” In any note-taking tool I use, I find simple shorthand helpful, like triple asterisks (***) for key points and &&& for memorable quotes. Pick symbols easy to type during a live meeting. Search for your symbols later to find what you flagged.

• Ask permission first. Even though Granola doesn’t record audio, let people know you’re using an AI note-taker if it’s not a public event. I usually say something like: “Is it okay if I use an AI note-taker to sum up the meeting? I’m happy to share the summary with you.” Turn on Automatic Consent Messaging to send a chat message when meetings start letting people know you’re using Granola.

• Split long events into separate sessions. If you’re at a three-hour workshop with distinct segments, stop and restart Granola between sections. You’ll get more detailed summaries for each section instead of one sprawling summary.

• Choose your AI model. On the paid plan, you can select an advanced AI model. I like Claude’s Sonnet 4.6 Thinking. You can switch to a Gemini or ChatGPT model.

Limitations

No tool does everything. Here are some of Granola’s limits so far:

• No audio or video playback. You can’t go back and listen to what someone said for the emotion in their voice.

• No file uploads yet. You can’t drag in an old interview recording or audio file for transcription. So far the focus is on live meetings.

• Chats can get messy. Granola doesn’t have a place to store answers you get when you query your meetings. You have to copy & paste into a separate notes tool. And it’s not optimized for taking notes without audio.

• Limited free archive. On the free plan, you only get access to 30 days of meeting archives.

• No Android app yet. Available on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. I expect the Android app to launch later in 2026.

Alternatives to Granola

Granola is best for people who take their own notes during meetings and want AI to fill in the rest. If you’re on Android, Otter is a popular alternative until Granola’s Android version is available. If you want to upload recordings, or if you need video or audio saved, consider these alternatives instead:

• Fathom is a good option if you want video and audio recordings tied to a time-coded summary. Click on part of the summary to jump to that part of the recording. Start with the free version. It’s useful for sessions where you want to go back and watch specific moments. I sometimes use Fathom alongside Granola for this reason.

• MacWhisper is useful for transcribing audio files you’ve recorded elsewhere. It can run locally on your Mac, so nothing leaves your device. You can buy it as a one-time purchase for $74. The free version also works well.

• Supernormal just launched version 2.0, which I’m testing. So far I like the new desktop app. It no longer sends bots to meetings; like Granola, it runs on your device. Unlike Granola, it can also act as an AI agent, creating materials for you. In my testing, its agent generated helpful post-meeting summary slides. Here’s how Supernormal compares its tool to Granola.

• For more options: Wonder Tools contributor Ulrike Langer, who writes the great News Machines newsletter about how news orgs are using AI, recently wrote a guide to transcription tools with additional alternatives.

• 🦄 Unicorn: Back when I started using Granola, it was a small startup. Now it’s valued at $1.5 billion dollars, with a $125 recent investment round.

How to get started 🚀

1. Try it for one meeting. Download Granola on Mac or Windows, or grab the iPhone app. Connect your calendar and join a meeting. Take a few notes. See how Granola combines them afterwards with the transcript into a summary.

2. Try an in-person meeting. Bring your iPhone to a coffee meeting or a live event and open the Granola app. See how the mobile transcription feels.

3. Chat with your first summary. After your meeting, try asking:

   • “What were the three main takeaways?”

   • “What deadlines or follow-ups should I remember?”

   • “Summarize this meeting in 3 sentences for a colleague.”

Try Granola free for a month →

What note taker do you use and why? Leave a comment 👇

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Takeaways from Our Conversation 🛠️

• Teach your AI assistant to offer personalized editing suggestions. I’ve trained a Claude Project to learn from my past writing and editing. It catches typos like double commas, cliches, redundant language, weak verbs, and sloppy copy. Instead of having it make changes, I ask it for a punch list of suggestions.

• Talk before you type. I turn on my AI dictation app, Letterly, and just start talking. The AI-enabled transcription and summary I get helps me make sense of ideas rolling around in my mind. Then the next part of the writing process becomes more about shaping and editing those ideas, rather than staring down a blank screen.

• Ask AI to interview you. After a conference or a day of meetings, get your AI assistant to ask you follow-up questions. That conversation forces you to articulate ideas you haven’t fully formed.

• Teach your AI assistant to be a critic, not a ghostwriter. Ask it to challenge your structure, suggest sections to cut and to explain why, and to point out your blind spots. Your friend might be too polite to tell you a section of your piece you’ve worked on for hours is redundant or dull. Your AI assistant will, if you train it to.

• Let’s read books collectively. We’re reading 10 AI books in 2026 through the Wonder Tools Book Group. (For WT paid subscribers). We started with AI Snake Oil, whose co-author was a surprise guest at our first gathering. Reading together allows us to benefit from dialogue. And we can learn more deeply from books than we can from a random diet of posts and videos.

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Tips Jason shared during our conversation

• Work from a calendar, not a to-do list. Sometimes what’s most valuable is a workflow, not a specific tool. Like timeboxing. Jason predicts how long a task will take, blocks time in his calendar (iCal), then learns from the difference between his estimate and how long the task actually took. His timeboxing Medium post about the process went viral.

• Build a grumpy editor. Jason created a J. Jonah Jameson–style editor persona in Gemini. If you’re not familiar with the Spider-Man character, he’s a cantankerous, chain-smoking newspaper editor who tears apart a writer’s drafts. Jason says he takes about half of the suggestions.

• Choose your tools based on who built them. Jason uses Grammarly and Gemini, but refuses to use Meta AI or Grok. If he doesn’t trust those building a platform, he opts out.

• Learn the analog way before you go digital. Jason suggests students draw by hand first, not on an iPad. If you draw a bad line with a dip pen, you can’t hit undo. You learn through that process.

• Use AI to brainstorm, but know when to stop. Cartoonist of Cartooning in the Age of AI used an AI assistant to riff on cartoon premises from messy notes. Jason said she was intrigued by the results, until the bot offered to draw the cartoon for her. 👇

Tools & Apps We Discussed 👇

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🌤️ 7:00 am Wake up and prepare for the day

⏰ Peakeep “Invisible” Alarm Clock

This $14 bedside clock wakes me up. I set its brightness at zero to keep the bedroom dark at night. I tap the top to check the time if I need to. I bought the clock when I decided to store my phone in another room so it doesn’t suck me in before bed.

⭕️ Oura Ring

For the past five years I’ve worn an Oura ring to keep track of my exercise, sleep, and heart rate volatility. I like that, unlike an Apple or Google Watch, it has no distracting screen or notifications.

I ran a two-week experiment pairing the Oura with a Stelo glucose biosensor to see how my diet impacts my sleep, fitness, and energy levels. I can export my data and query it with AI assistants. Or I use Oura’s own AI chat to ask things like “How is my evening snacking affecting the quality of my sleep?”

In the morning I check my sleep quality and resilience scores to calibrate my expectations for the day. Having an objective measure of how well I’ve slept helps me decide whether to push my meager exercise regimen a bit or take it easy. It also helps motivate me on dreary days, and signals when I’m getting sick before I notice.

(Read my original Oura 2020 post. Note: I’ve bought my own Oura rings — no affiliation).

🧠 Brain Games and 🎶 Music

A breakfast ritual: playing the NYTimes’ Spelling Bee, Wordle, and Connections with my wife and daughters while listening to our favorite classical music host, Jeff Spurgeon, on WQXR. We talk about the music and what’s ahead at school or work, avoiding stressful headlines.

Quick tip: We listen on our old Google Home Mini kitchen smart speaker. A quick voice command pulls up just about any radio station in the world. (I saw the newer Google Nest Mini on sale this week for $19).

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🚶🏼8:00 Walk My Daughter to School 🏫

No tools or tech.

🚊 8:25 Commute

I use Snipd to listen to podcasts on the way to work. Here’s my full take. I also rely on Readwise Reader to catch up on articles I’ve saved. It works offline on the subway. Here’s why it’s worth trying. I use Superhuman to check work email.

📆 8:50 Plan the Day

When I get to work, I map out what's ahead with a mix of paper and apps.

📅 Google Calendar I check GCal for meetings. I‘ve tried other calendars, including Vimcal, Akiflow, Fantastical, and Notion Calendar. They each have useful features, but I tend to return to the free GCal out of habit. It’s reliable, simple, and lets me easily see shared calendars.

✅ Apple Reminders I keep three priority tasks at the top of my list. I add to that tier only when I’ve completed one. I have a menu of other tasks and reminders in a “Soon” list. I adopted that tactic from ’s great book, Four Thousand Weeks.

📄 Remarkable Paper Pro Move I use this paper tablet — or a notebook — to timebox my day. I map the hours based on priorities, energy level, and scheduled meetings. Having a detailed plan helps me avoid decision fatigue later. When I inevitably lose focus, the plan pulls me back on track.

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✍️ 9:00 Writing

I start creative work early, when my focus is freshest.

Letterly I dictate my thoughts into this app. That helps me get ideas flowing, and I get a bulleted summary or outline to build on. When I want an AI assistant to challenge my ideas, I use ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode or Gemini Live.

Letterly and other apps like it (AudioPen) are great for what I call bionic dictation— using AI to structure raw speech into a clean outline or summary.

Free alternatives: You can use Apple Notes for dictation on iOS or Mac, or a variety of Google apps if you’re on Android or a Chromebook.

Google Docs / iA Writer I like both of these reliable blank canvases with minimal friction. (Read my take on what’s new in GDocs and why I like iA Writer). I’m also exploring new writing apps like Versey, a minimalist editor with thoughtful AI features.

Raycast Without switching apps, I type [control-space] to open a floating Raycast window. I can then quickly add something to my reminder list or calendar, check a thesaurus, calculate something, or do other tasks. That helps maintain my writing flow. (Why Raycast is a hidden gem).

Headspace Focus music without lyrics helps me block out noise around my Times Square office.

📨 10:00 Email Sprint

Superhuman I use keyboard shortcuts to move quickly through 80 morning messages. To help me keep track of replies I’m waiting for, Superhuman lets me attach automated reminders to resurface messages weeks later. Boomerang is a good alternative for follow-ups if you use Outlook or Gmail.

Flow Dictating messages saves my hands from typing fatigue. It’s remarkably accurate and plugs text directly into whatever app I’m using.

⏸️ 10:55 Break

Wakeout This app features short video loops of real people doing stretching and cardio moves. I can imitate their movements for one-minute exercises. These body breaks improve my focus.

🔬 11:00 Research

• Perplexity provides thorough, citation-backed search results powered by AI models that understand my detailed queries. The summary saves me from digging through hundreds of raw links. (My Perplexity update).

• Claude Projects & NotebookLM These AI tools help me find common themes, key ideas, and examples in prior materials I’ve created, so I can build on my own past work. (More on Claude Projects & my guide to NotebookLM).

That's a glimpse into my morning toolkit. In a follow-up I’ll share tools I use from late morning through bedtime. 🛌

What tools are YOU using today?

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Some links are referral links. In some cases they provide you with a free month of access. If you make a purchase, Wonder Tools may earn a small commission, at no cost to you.

It’s improving every month. On March 13, Google announced Ask Maps, so you can query Gemini about things like “Which nearby tennis courts are open with lights so I can play tonight?” On March 10, Gemini added new integrations to build, summarize, and analyze your Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

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In today’s post below: catch up on the Gemini features worth your time, candid comparisons with other AI tools, and answers to the questions I hear most.

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5 Ways to Use Gemini’s Best Features

1. Create Images Without Being a Designer

Illustrate a presentation, newsletter post, or handout with a diagram, explanatory image, or an editorial cartoon.

Let’s call it “Vibe Drawing.” Just as vibe coding has enabled people without technical skills to develop useful apps, image generation helps those of us who are artistically challenged to convey ideas visually. I use it to turn raw ideas into graphics, diagrams, illustrations, or cartoons. Here’s a short prompt I used for the image below.

Tip: Upload a screenshot or photograph a paper sketch for Gemini to use as a reference image, or pick a style from the grid of options Gemini shows you (see above) to provide visual context.

2. Get Customized Deep Research Reports

The next time you want to better understand a place, person, event, technology, or organization, pick Gemini’s Deep Research tool and dictate a detailed query.

Tip: Specify why you need the report, how you’ll use it, your level of understanding, preferred sources, specific subtopics, and the angle, tone, or style you like (tables, bullets, diagrams, arguments and counterarguments, etc). You’ll get a remarkably thorough, personalized report. Read my guide to Deep Research, which includes comparisons with other AI research tools.

Examples of Deep Research reports I generated with Gemini

• AI Assistant Competitive Analysis 2026 — 20 pages, 53 sources

• AI for Medical Diagnostics 41 pages, 95 sources

• Michel de Montaigne 29 pages, 89 sources

• AI and the Future of Creativity 46 pages, 303 sources

3. Connect Gemini to Your NotebookLM Notes

Gemini now lets you attach a NotebookLM notebook as a source. I tested this with a collection of my writing to probe my past ideas with Gemini. I also used Gemini to query a notebook I curated with PDFs, links, and videos on congestion pricing.

Combining Gemini and NotebookLM offers several advantages:

• Gemini has access to the Web, so it can supplement references in a notebook with new research material, whereas NotebookLM is grounded only in your source materials. The combo is great when you want to query a mix of curated and new sources, but NotebookLM alone is preferable when you want to fully constrain your exploration to your own notes.

• NotebookLM can create audio and video overviews, infographics, and compelling slides from your materials. (Read more in my guide). But Gemini has even more tools it can apply to your notebooks, like Canvas for making apps, interactive graphics, and sites.

• You can query multiple notebooks at the same time with Gemini, something you can’t yet do with NotebookLM.

Note: Gemini has a context window of 1 million tokens, which means it can absorb and consider about 1,500 pages of text for any given query.

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4. Build Gems to Automate Repetitive Tasks

Gems are versions of Gemini with custom instructions. Create a Gemini Gem as a template for work you’ll do many times. Start by uploading reference documents and adding detailed guidance. If relevant, set it to always use a particular tool, like deep research, image generation, or Canvas for building interactive tools.

Example: I like making Jeopardy-style games for teaching, so I set up a Gem that lets me quickly create new editions for specific topics. I was inspired by ’s free collection of more than 100 EduGems, which he lets anyone adapt.

Create other Gems to…

• Check your work for bias or blind spots. To start, upload style guides, fact-checking instructions, or your pet peeves. Direct the Gem to be a tough critic rather than a sycophantic bootlicker. Instruct it to be specific and clear in its feedback.

• Create analytics reports in a specific format. Start by giving the Gem instructions and context. Then tell it to pull from data you add to a NotebookLM notebook, or feed your Gem new sheets or data screenshots anytime you want a new report. The Gem could even be set up to turn your data into an interactive dashboard if you instruct it to use its Canvas tool for coding.

• Generate alt-text, SEO text, invoices, or expense reports. Start by giving the Gem your preferences or policies, then open it anytime you want to take care of a technical task.

Gemini Gem Alternatives

Other AI platforms offer similar customization tools:

• ChatGPT: Create Custom GPTs either privately or to share with colleagues.

• Claude: Create Skills for Claude, teaching it a specific way to analyze or design something. Or set up Projects with detailed instructions and knowledge files. Read my guide to Claude Projects.

• Perplexity: create Spaces with instructions and reference files.

5. Build an App, Game, or Interactive Tool

Gemini can generate code, just as it can make text or images. Select the Canvas tool and describe a site, game, tool, dashboard, or interactive infographic you want to make.

Ideas and examples

• Build a custom flashcard app. How? Give it a PDF with 100 Japanese vocabulary words.

• Get strategic recommendations with an interactive dashboard. Give it your metrics output, and make sure it’s in Thinking mode.

• Get help memorizing poems. How? Share a list of your favorites and ask for a spaced repetition game to help with memorization.

• Practice sign language phrases. Tell it what you know or don’t know and how you prefer to practice. Or upload a selfie video and request feedback.You can also use Gemini’s Guided Learning mode for this. Read my guide to AI as a tutor.

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Gemini vs. Other AI Tools

Gemini beats Claude on versatility

Gemini can generate images, videos, and songs — and analyze video content— none of which Claude does.

… but I prefer Claude’s editing suggestions

I regularly rely on its Projects feature. Claude also has useful integrations with many other services I use, like Granola, so I can query my meeting notes. Gemini doesn’t yet have extensive integrations.

Gemini beats ChatGPT in integrating NotebookLM

I love being able to query an entire notebook full of lengthy YouTube videos, audio files, links, and notes.

… but ChatGPT has a wider range of Custom GPTs,

ChatGPT also has built-in apps that let you design with Canva, Figma, or other tools, which you can’t do with Gemini.

Gemini has the deepest integration with Docs, Sheets, and Slides

The newest features let you create a complete dashboard in Google Sheets from data in Google Drive, generate editable slides that match the style of a presentation, and match the format of existing docs.

… but Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot also work well with Google Drive

You can pull in content from Google Drive regardless of which AI tool you use. And Claude Code and Cowork have unique capabilities. They act as AI agents that independently manage sequences of tasks.

Gemini Basics

1. Add Files for Context

• Upload up to 10 files to provide context for any prompt. For example, if you’re asking for help summarizing your organization’s policies for a new colleague, you can upload thousands of pages worth of rules and regulations.

• Most files can be up to 100MB in size. Videos can be 2GB and up to 5 minutes long. Audio files can be 10 minutes long. With Gemini’s video analysis, you can even ask for input on your public speaking or knitting technique if you record yourself.

• Pro tip: You can reference dozens of files, links, or videos by choosing NotebookLM and using an entire notebook as context for your prompt.

  

2. Pick a Tool

• To generate something other than a text response, pick from Gemini’s tool menu. It will create an image, dashboard, visual explanation, 20-page research report, 8-second video, or 30-second song.

• If you opt into Google Labs, you can also turn on Personal Intelligence as a Gemini tool setting. That allows Gemini to customize responses based on other aspects of your Google account, like your Drive or Gmail.

3. Choose Speed or Depth

• Choose between Fast mode for quick responses, Thinking mode for deeper reasoning, or Pro mode if you’re doing deep analysis on a coding problem or a 300-page PDF. Pro mode is limited on free plans.

• My tip: Use Thinking mode as much as possible, for high-quality responses. Choose Fast mode only for simple requests, like alternative words for generosity.

4. Dictate, Type or Paste Your Prompt

Include a detailed prompt that specifies what you’re working on, what your goal is, and how you plan to use Gemini’s response. For example:

“Generate a detailed summary of our company travel policies based on these 5 attached documents. Include the key country-specific details as a table. I’ll use this to supplement an onboarding resource for new colleagues I’m developing, so keep it concise.”

• Use voice dictation as often as you can. Click on Gemini’s mic button to use your voice. You’ll see the words appear on screen as you dictate, so you can correct or edit anything before submitting your query. Alternatively, use an external tool like Flow, the app I use to dictate in any app.

• Many of us can speak 3 to 6 times faster than we type. We also edit our words less when we speak. So using your voice often results in more detailed prompts, which yield better responses.

• Voice dictation isn’t the same as Gemini Live, a conversational mode where you chat back and forth, similar to ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode. That mode is useful for practicing a foreign language, simulating an interview, or rehearsing for a difficult conversation. Read more on why I rely on Voice AI.

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Brief Answers to Gemini Questions

Q: Is Gemini free? A: Yes, with limits. Basic features are free, but some advanced capabilities, like video generation, require a subscription of ~$20/month.

Q: Which AI should I use — Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT? A: Tough one. My short answer, as of today: Use Gemini for image generation and Google Workspace integration; Claude when you want to give your AI assistant special skills, writing styles, or deep project context; and ChatGPT for the widest range of third-party apps. I’ve found all three to be consistently helpful AI assistants.

Q: How is using Gemini different from using Google.com? A: Googling gets you links. Gemini creates content, builds tools, and reasons through problems. Gemini is a work assistant while Google is a search tool. I find Gemini’s Deep Research to be much more valuable than a typical Google search, and I often search Perplexity when I want to understand a complex issue. (Here’s why).

Q: Can Gemini access my Google Drive files? A: Yes, if you opt in, it can analyze data in your sheets, update slides, summarize your email, or create a dashboard based on files in your Drive.

Q: Is what I share with Gemini totally private? A: Not necessarily. If you’re on a Google Workspace paid plan, Google’s Privacy Hub says your content isn’t reviewed by humans or used to train AI models. If you’re on a free plan, or even a personal paid plan, Google may use your data to improve its services. Check the privacy overview for details on how Gemini handles your data.

Q: What can I do about privacy? A: Take Gemini’s privacy page seriously when it says “please don’t enter confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our services.” Visit your Apps Activity Page to check and adjust your data retention settings.

If you’re deeply concerned, consider private AI services. Jan and Msty, for example, work offline, without sending any data away of your computer to external servers. Here’s how you can use AI privately for free on your laptop, without a complicated setup.

📺 Watch the full conversation above, or read highlights below.

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10 Ways to Use AI 🛠️

Note: Lance and I alternated tips below 👇

1. Spark Richer Student Reflection 🪞

Lance: Ask students to reflect through a conversation with AI rather than staring at a blank page. A well-prompted AI will keep asking follow-up questions, pushing students past “I didn’t like it” toward real analysis.

2. Strengthen Your Syllabus 📋

Jeremy: Give an AI assistant your syllabus and ask for a critique — for clarity, inclusivity, student-friendliness, and completeness. You’ll get specific, honest feedback. The AI won’t write the syllabus for you, but it will challenge you to make yours better.

We don’t always have colleagues at our side who can offer input on our work. So this is an objective, independent, instant, constructive way to get a useful critique.

3. Make Materials More Visual 🎨

Lance: Turn your syllabus into a graphic version students actually want to read. AI assistants can help you create visual layouts and simple comics-style explanations without any design experience.

4. Improve Lesson Plans 📐

Jeremy: Describe your learning goals, your class size, your constraints — then ask AI to generate 10 warm-up or closing activities. You won’t use most of them, and you might remix a couple. But having options means you’ll often figure out something better than what you’d have designed alone.

5. Try It Until Something Clicks ⚡

Lance: Play with AI until it does something that genuinely surprises or excites you. That moment of “Wait, I could actually use this,” is what shifts the conversation from theoretical to real.

“For some students, this is really powerful, including students navigating English as a second language or ADHD or dyslexia — these tools can unlock things.”

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6. Build Engaging Class Activities 🧩

Jeremy: When you need a compelling analogy for a hard concept, or a historical anecdote, or a mini case study for a short role-play exercise, AI assistants can be helpful in expanding what we consider. If you’re teaching a subject you know well, you can set the direction and take responsibility for verification.

NotebookLM and Claude can generate examples quickly, and can search your own notes to surface examples you’ve created yourself but lost track of. The goal of using AI in this context is strengthening engagement and improving the learning experience. It’s not for whiz-bang special effects.

7. Generate “Bad Examples” Safely 🚫

Lance: Examples can be useful to illustrate what not to do, but you’d never embarrass a student by presenting their work as an example of a mistake.

“We’re never, ever going to — nor should we — ask a student, ‘This was a really horrible thing, can I use it as a bad example going forward?’”

AI tools can generate intentionally flawed examples: a weak argument, a poorly structured paragraph, or circular reasoning. Students learn what to avoid.

8. Catch What You’re Missing 🔍

Jeremy: Ask an AI assistant to review your materials for accessibility gaps, unclear instructions or areas where your material could be more inclusive. Think of it as a thoughtful colleague who reviews your work and catches what familiarity made you miss.

9. Analyze Student Feedback 📊

Lance: Strip names and any identifying information from end-of-semester feedback, then ask AI to identify themes, patterns, and gaps. As Lance put it, “What are some things that I’m not seeing? What are some assumptions I’m making or missing? What are some ways I might redirect the course?” Instead of spending hours manually categorizing open-ended comments, you get a usable overview in minutes — leaving more time to actually act on what students told you.

10. Remember What Was Said 🗒️

Jeremy: Use an AI note-taker like Granola to capture transcripts of student meetings, advising sessions, and office hours. Request permission first. You’ll have searchable records of what was discussed, questions that came up, and what you suggested. That’s particularly useful as time passes and it gets harder to remember the nuances of what you talked about.

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Lance’s Free Resources for Educators 🎁

Lance is unusually generous in sharing what he’s learned. A few to bookmark:

• AI Syllabi Policies Collection — 200+ real AI policies from faculty across disciplines. See Lance’s post for more context and ideas for applying this.

• Prompts for Educators — a curated tab of tested prompts on his Substack

• Faculty Cohort AI Survey — Lance is gathering data about AI training

• AI + Education = Simplified — his newsletter, worth following for insight

4 More Ideas Worth Noting 💬

1. Nostalgia for the Pre-AI Era 🏺

AI is making polished, professional-looking output trivially easy to produce. That may make what’s authentically human and imperfect more valuable.

“There’s this moment of longing,” Lance said, “for the days when papers students submitted had grammatical errors.” Professors are already nostalgic for flawed student papers.

We may look back on writing of the early 2020s the way we now look at 1900s-era hand-drawn maps or handmade clothing: reminders of a period when you could look at something and know a person made it.

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of pottery and homemade cookies. 🏺🍪Our imperfect things often have more appeal precisely because they’re made with human hands.

“There’s a growing thread about the irrelevance of higher education,” Lance said, “and AI feeds that.” Institutions and creators who figure out how to signal genuine human authorship will have an edge.

Tools are already emerging to signal human authorship. I recently began testing a tool called OKhuman, which verifies that you actually typed something yourself, using your mic to listen to your keystrokes for evidence. This tool’s existence tells you something about where we’re headed.

2. Why Higher Ed is Struggling 🏛️

It’s easy to be impatient with schools that still haven’t developed a coherent AI approach three years in. Lance pushed back on that frustration with useful context. “This happened right on the heels of the pandemic,” he said.

“Every semester it was just like, ‘We have a new format for you.’” Faculty had restructured entire courses repeatedly, switching to remote teaching mid-semester, then hybrid, then back.

Then AI arrived and disrupted assessment design all over again. “If you do that well,” Lance said, of traditional course alignment, “then your course is a deeply intricate web in which everything is related. AI comes in and, in some ways, obliterates the way we do assessments, which means everything else also has to be changed.”

Add funding cuts, political pressure, and leadership distracted by institutional fires, and the picture is complicated.

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3. You Can Build Your Own Tools Now 🔧

Lance mentioned that he’s been building custom software, including an MP3 player designed exactly the way he wants it, an RSS reader, and a podcast organizer, even though he doesn’t have a coding background. “This is the first time I’ve really felt like, ‘Oh! I can actually build stuff.”

If you’ve assumed that building custom tools requires a developer, revisit that assumption. AI-powered “vibe coding” tools have lowered the barriers to creating software, making it easier for educators to build what they need.

4. AI May Lead to a New Equity Gap ⚖️

When schools don’t provide AI tools and leave students to their own devices, they inadvertently create a two-tiered system.

As Lance put it: “You have the inequity of the person who’s using the frontier, high-paid model, and the student who gets a limited amount on the free version.” This isn’t an abstract concern. It affects the quality of work students can produce and the skills they develop. For educators and administrators, it’s a reason to push for institutional access, rather than assuming students will figure it out on their own.

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Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into this live video with !

Escape AI slop by reading more books. 📚 That’s my plan for making the most of leisure time this year. One book a week. Some short. Others mostly visual — I love graphic novels. Plus a new AI & tech book group I’m starting.

Books get my eyes off screens, and my brain welcomes that break from news, vitriol, and ads. Read on for my updated guide to finding great read this year.

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📖 Find your next read

• Most Recommended Books Pick the name of an expert to see what books they recommend and why.

• Goodbooks.io and Read This Twice Explore interesting expert picks.

• En.app Describe the kind of book you’re looking for and get suggestions.

• Whichbook’s World Map 🗺️ Find books set anywhere in the world. Select a country to see a collection of books that take place there. See how it works👇

• Where to find book recs is a nice evergreen list from . I also like the eclectic recs in the NYTimes’s Read Like the Wind newsletter and its intriguing list: Top 100 books of the 21st century.

• The most mentioned books in podcasts is a neat list from Snipd. In Snipd’s podcast app you can see which books any podcast has mentioned most.

• BookClubs lets you find a book group near you or organize your own.

• Fable hosts book clubs & communities for nearly any genre.

Find free and cheap books 🔦

• Project Gutenberg offers more than 75,000 free ebooks and audiobooks. No registration required. The Top 100 list is a nice source for free reading.

• The Internet Archive has searchable e-books and a free library collection.

• Bookbub spotlights discounted ebooks on its site and email newsletter.

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📚 Announcing the NEW Wonder Tools Book Group 🌟

I’m excited to launch a new Wonder Tools book group 📚 exploring the most fascinating recent AI and tech books. Each month we’ll have a live online session with a lively discussion, and you’ll also get a book guide with quotes, highlights and insights. Occasional surprise guests will join. 💫

This new series, starting in March, is sponsored by Shortform, which publishes high-quality, in-depth guides to non-fiction books. All paid subscribers are invited! Join now for this, and free AI tool access, live monthly online workshops introducing new tools, + other inner circle benefits.

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Libby has free ebooks and audiobooks from libraries in 78 countries. It works for 90% of U.S. libraries. Check out nearly anything instantly, for free, on any device. You can read your free ebooks in the app or on a Kindle.

• Audio or text Check out and listen to free audiobooks or ebooks.

• Multiple cards Libby lets you add cards for multiple libraries. That’s useful if a book you want has a waiting list. You can check which library has the shortest waiting list. See where you can get non-resident library cards.

Limitation: Libby is digital-only — you can’t use it for physical books. That requires a separate app or site, like the NYPL app in New York.

Kanopy provides free access to top-notch feature films and documentaries. I log in with my library card. Watch on the web, iOS or Android, or on a smart TV app like Google TV, Roku, or Amazon Fire TV. Libraries cap the number of videos you can watch monthly.

Hoopla is a free app for accessing 3 million audiobooks, ebooks, comics, magazines, and music from 11,500 libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Read, watch or listen in 120 languages from the web or on a mobile device. Bingepasses let you access movies, TV shows, & video courses.

World Cat tells you which library near you has a book you want. It works in multiple languages and covers 10,000 global libraries. Search for books in print, ebook, braille, or audio.

📕 Support Independent booksellers

• Find the cheapest places online to buy any book: Bookfinder

• Find a nearby independent bookstore: Indiebound

• Get cheap used books: Abebooks. Check its bargain books + collections.

• Support your local bookstore with an online purchase. Bookshop.org has raised more than $40 million for indie bookstores.

• Buy audiobooks from local bookstores: Libro.fm

• Shop at an online co-op bookshop owned by readers: Tertulia

Bonus Tip: Prompt AI for personalized reading recommendations 📚

Create your own taste atlas. Make a list of books you’ve liked or learned from. Add movies and music you love too, or other interests. Share the list with Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT. Ask for recommendations based on your tastes.

🧒 Find great children’s books

• Sora, the library app, not the AI video tool, is a digital library for kids. Schools make ebooks and audiobooks available on the app. It works well with graphic novels, picture books, as well as comic books and textbooks. (My family also uses Libby to check out kids books).

• Epic is another popular kids ebook app. It’s fun to use, but it leans into gamification and extrinsic motivation. It entices kids with points and streaks to keep them opening the app.

• Kanopy has a great kids section with video versions of books by Eric Carle, Mo Willems and other greats. It also has math and science lessons.

• How to Raise a Reader is a wonderful guide to children’s books.

• Common Sense Media has helpful info for parents about sensitive content in children’s books to help with finding age-appropriate books and movies.

Bonus tools: Check out a well-curated list of 55 apps for book lovers from Bookscouter, where you can buy and sell books.

📚 Your Comment? What’s an underrated way to find great books?

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💡 What Exactly is Timeboxing?

Timeboxing is the practice of scheduling tasks and deep work onto a calendar. When you specify how long you’ll spend on each task, timeboxing helps match your priorities to your available time for a realistic plan.

🏫 My Daily Routine

I start the day with 15 minutes of planning. I usually use a notebook, a whiteboard, or Sunsama. I review tasks, set priorities, and schedule time slots for deep work. Timeboxing for me means assigning tasks to open blocks of time between meetings, teaching, and other work responsibilities I have at the City University of New York.

🎯 Who Benefits Most?

Timeboxing is especially useful if you

• Have flexibility in scheduling your own time

• Need time for creative work

• Know your own concentration patterns, and when you’re best able to focus

Tip: Start by timeboxing just part of your schedule if unpredictable work limits your flexibility.

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✅ How to Start Timeboxing

1. Choose your planning time Pick either the end of your workday or first thing in the morning. I prefer the morning, when I’m most focused.

2. List your priorities Spend five minutes listing your most important tasks for the upcoming work session. Not everything. Just the top few.

3. List necessities Write down other tasks that have to get done today.

4. List notes and for-later items For two minutes, jot down anything else on your mind. This could be details or reminders for your day’s work, or secondary tasks you’ll schedule later.

5. Estimate durations Next to each task, estimate how long you think it will take. Add a 25 to 50% buffer to account for interruptions or subtasks you may not have accounted for. Perfectionists underestimate how long precision will take.

6. Block your calendar Schedule each task into a specific time slot.

7. Review at day’s end Consider how long things actually took. Ask yourself what worked well and what didn’t. Reflections will strengthen future plans.

Pro tip: Start small. Begin with the simplest tool at hand, whether that’s paper and pen or your existing Outlook or Google Calendar.

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🤖 How an AI Assistant Can Help with Timeboxing

Try asking Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini to help you map out your time. Share a screenshot of your calendar and/or list your priorities for the day/week. Prompt your AI assistant to help you map out your day(s), interviewing you as necessary.

Alternatively, connect your AI assistant to your Google Calendar or Outlook to give your AI assistant a window into your schedule. You can do so with ChatGPT’s apps, Claude’s connector for Google Calendar, or Gemini’s calendar access. Then share your task list.

Adapt one of the following prompts:

For weekly planning: “Help me plan my week. Here are my primary projects and tasks: [list or link to doc]. I want to protect mornings for deep work and batch meetings in the afternoon. Create a realistic daily schedule for Monday through Friday.”

If you connect your calendar: “Look at my Google (or Outlook) Calendar for this week. Identify open time slots between my existing meetings. Then take this task list [paste list] and create a timeboxed plan that fits each task into an available slot. I prefer [the most demanding work scheduled before noon (or fill in other preferences or constraints)].”

[While experimenting as I wrote this post, I generated a new timeboxing song — and another one— with Gemini’s new Lyria 3 music assistant.]

🧩 Productivity Approaches to Pair with Timeboxing

• The Eisenhower Matrix = Focus on assessing what is urgent and important.

  • While Eisenhower analysis helps you prioritize and decide what to do, timeboxing helps you decide when to do it and how much time to spend. It also nudges you to commit by putting it on the calendar.

• Eat the Frog = Do the most important or most difficult task first.

  • Timeboxing helps give you a structure for putting that task onto your calendar and allocating sufficient time for it.

• The 80/20 Rule = 20% of the work you do delivers 80% of the most important value.

  • This Pareto principle helps when you’re deciding what’s worth your time. Timeboxing helps you execute on that prioritization by making it tangible on your schedule.

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Timeboxing Tools to Try

• Graph paper works well. Organize your schedule into boxes, with each representing 10 or 15 minutes. Here’s a nice notebook version.

• Sand timer It’s old-fashioned, attractive, and doesn’t require batteries or a screen. Get one that lasts 15 minutes — or whatever work interval you prefer. I find the visual reminder helps me stay focused.

  • Writing expert recommended this $9 sand timer in her useful piece about gifts for writers.

• A nice notebook and pen offer a clean surface for planning. I like the feel of Leuchtturm1917 notebooks and their durability. They’re pricey, though. These mini notebooks for a cheaper alternative, at less than a dollar apiece.

• Post-its Put one 15-minute task or deep work step on each Post-it. Line up eight for a two-hour work sprint.

Google Sheets / Microsoft Excel

A free spreadsheet can work well for planning if you work independently and don’t rely on a digital calendar.

• Here's a blank Google Sheets template for planning in 30-minute increments. Click “Use Template” at the top right to make your own private version. Or copy it. Adjust it to suit your needs, or prompt your AI assistant of choice to make you a custom template.

• To access your sheet as you work, print it out, bookmark the tab, or use it on your phone as your portable schedule.

• Avoid the temptation to decorate or perfect your spreadsheet.

  • If you want to make it easier to read, use the Format > Alternating Colors menu option in Google Sheets).

  • Optionally use checkboxes to mark completed tasks to reward yourself for getting stuff done.

  • I’ve tried using color codes to categorize priorities for a visual overview of where my time was going. It’s not necessary.

• Benefits: Google Sheets is free, simple, and easy to use. So is Excel if it’s already part of your workflow. You can later upload the sheets to your AI assistant for help analyzing your time if you find that useful.

Google Tasks

Use Google’s free task manager to list out priorities, then drag them directly onto your Google calendar for scheduling. It’s simple, fast and handy if you already use Google Calendar. It works well across operating systems, but doesn’t let you adjust the duration of tasks.

Sunsama

This is my preferred daily planning software. I use it on my laptop — you can also use it on iOS or Android. You can sync it to your existing task lists and calendar, or use it by itself.

When you open Sunsama it prompts you to reflect on the prior day and to plan your upcoming work. You can add new tasks or import them from other apps like Todoist and Asana. You can then drag tasks onto your calendar to schedule your day.

Integrations and pricing: Sunsama syncs with Outlook and Google Calendar as well as Slack, Trello, Todoist, Monday, Notion, ClickUp, and Zapier so you can link it to other tools, so you don’t need to flip between apps. At $20/month it’s a well-designed pro option for those with a budget for work tools. Too pricey? Stick to the free alternatives above.

Alternatives: Akiflow is an advanced timeboxing tool for designers, founders, marketers, and others with lots of meetings. My colleague has recommended Motion, which has extensive AI features and works well for teams. Reclaim is another service I’ve tested (with free and $10 plans). It has time tracking, lots of integrations with task apps, and can move deep work slots automatically for you when meetings are added to your calendar. All of these tools, including Sunsama, can integrate with whatever online calendar tool you’re already using.

🔄 How I Changed My Workflow

I used to dive into email first thing. I would tackle tasks as they came to mind, or based purely on urgency. I would pause work throughout the day to figure out what to do next.

Now I usually set up a detailed schedule first, then focus on doing. When I stopped frequently to decide what to do next, I was squandering focus.

At the end of the day, I take five minutes to think about what worked and what didn’t so I can plan better next time. When I’m in a rush, it’s just one minute.

👀 Reality check: I still often mess up my intended approach and hop from task to task without finishing things. I sometimes dwell longer than necessary on email messages, ruminate, self-blame, and waste time with structured procrastination. I now recognize this when it starts happening. I go for a quick walk, then start fresh.

⚠️ Common Traps to Avoid

1. Overscheduling / Leave buffer time for unexpected tasks and rabbit holes.

2. Unrealistic estimates / Double the time you expect tasks to take.

3. Ignoring energy levels / Match challenging tasks to your peak energy times.

4. Too much rigidity / Build in flex time for inevitable disruptions.

5. Planning too far ahead / Focus on your next work session, not next week.

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📚 Recommended Resources 👇

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As we aim to stretch people’s thinking in a new direction, tools are just one part of the overall picture. But they can help. Last week I shared five tools for creating learning paths, interactive lessons, and new kinds of digital notebooks. Today’s follow-up recommendations focus on creative engagement.

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You don’t have to be a teacher to find these resources for opening up participation useful. If you lead a team, run meetings, or collaborate with colleagues, you can benefit from these tools.

I’ve baked into this post multiple ways to engage.

• Chime in on the teaching tool chat thread

• Share your idea on the shared Padlet about teaching tactics

• Test out your trivia skills on my new open Kahoot quiz game

• Add a comment to the shared Craft doc about lesson planning

Padlet — Inspire Creative Collaboration

Padlets are digital bulletin boards where people can post comments, links, voice recordings, or short videos.

How it works: Set up a board with a topic or a template. Start with a blank grid, map, timeline, discussion thread, or an image gallery. Participants can use their own devices to add notes, documents, images or comments. Or they can use Padlet’s built-in recorder to add audio or video.

How you can use it: Build a board to accompany a live, collaborative lesson, event, or meeting. Or have people contribute to it asynchronously. You can also use it as a showcase for exceptional work, or as a space for peer collaboration.

How I use it: I find Padlet useful for group brainstorming, icebreakers, and for online learning activities. For remote classes, I’ve used Padlet to collect questions before class and for team-building collections, gathering people’s favorite songs, books, and snacks, to help us get to know one another. I’ve also used Padlet as a more visual, welcoming, version of an online discussion board.

Who it works for: It’s easy to use, so most people jump in without any training. Padlet works at all levels. I’ve used it with graduate students and for mid-career training., as well as with colleagues. It’s popular in elementary and high schools too. It’s one of the best tools for getting people to build on each other’s ideas, rather than passively consuming content.

Example — try it! Jump into my board on Engagement tactics for impactful teaching. Explore the ideas others have added and contribute one of your own!

Pricing: It’s free to create up to three boards, or $120/year for unlimited use.

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Kahoot — Add Fun to Learning

No other teaching tool generates as many smiles and laughs as Kahoot. It turns quizzes into playful learning games.

Why it’s so useful: What makes Kahoot especially engaging is the variety of question formats: In addition to standard multiple-choice and true-false queries, you can have students drop pins on images, fill in blanks, guess numbers, or order items in a list.

How to get started: Design your own quizzes or pick from a massive library of questions by teachers and organizations around the world, like National Geographic and NASA. People can play individually or in teams, live or asynchronously. You can share a link or show the game on screen. People play on their own phone or laptop by answering questions and earning points..

How I use Kahoot: Sometimes I start class with icebreaker questions, or conclude a session with a review game. Occasionally, if I sense students losing energy or focus, I’ll turn class-related questions into a playful Kahoot competition for a change of pace.

Example — try it! Play a new Kahoot I created about journalism AI. Email me afterwards with a screenshot of your completed game for a digital prize.

New tip: Kahoot has a new AI assistant built in, so you can quickly convert text from any document or handout into editable quiz questions.

Pricing ranges from $3/month (50 players at a time) to $19/month (200 players). Kahoot’s pricing has gotten more complicated: some quizzes & special features now require premium plans.

Alternatives: Gimkit, Wayground and Blooket are good alternative game-style quiz platforms that offer fuller free plans for those on a tight budget. Genially also works well for classroom games, or try the free JeopardyLabs. (Browse and try out existing Jeopardy boards like AI in Schools).

Craft — Organize your Materials

Craft is a surprisingly useful, underrated tool for creating and organizing notes and documents. Use it to develop attractive lesson plans, student handouts, syllabi, or collections of resources.

How to use it: Organize materials into neat visual cards students or colleagues can click to explore. Add text, images, links, or tables to your documents. They’ll be more visually appealing than Microsoft Word or Google docs, or Apple Notes.

Sharing Craft docs: It’s easy to share Craft docs publicly or privately with a link, or export them as PDFs or Word docs. You can even transfer content directly to Ulysses, Bear, iA Writer, Day One, or other tools. I find it easier to use than Notion, Coda, or other pro tools I like, and I prefer the look of the shared docs.

Example — see how it looks: Here’s a Lesson Planning Resource I made with Craft to illustrate how you can use it for handouts and guides. It has subpages that hold PDFs, notes, docs, lists, and various other content.

Other features: Craft has a remarkably good mobile app for designing and viewing full docs. And while docs are private by default, you can now enable collaborative or even public editing, so people can work together on a project.

Pricing: Craft is free with a content limit, or $6/month for unlimited use. (I include Craft as part of a bundle of pro tools paid Wonder Tools subscribers get access to for free).

Bottom line: Consider Craft as a new, flexible place to make, organize, and share docs, especially if you’re drowning in scattered teaching materials.

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The top tier tools have consistently been super valuable for me — in my teaching, in my job at the City University of New York, and as a dad of two daughters. To save you the time and effort of sifting through the chaff, I’m sharing the ones I find most useful. Even if you’re not a teacher, these tools may help you gather, organize, share, and present material creatively.

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For context, the huge number of teaching tools clamoring for attention can be exhausting. School districts access 2,739 edtech tools a year, according to Instructure research and The 74, a nonprofit news organization that covers America’s education system, where I wrote recently about today’s tools.

Below you’ll find my first batch of recommendations, whether you teach once in a while or every day, children or adults. The services are all free to try, with paid upgrades available. I don’t work for any of these companies, I’m just a prof and writer who appreciates and shares helpful teaching tools. My list — starting with part one today — is designed to support teaching and learning at any level. I’d love to hear about the tools you find most useful for teaching & learning — add a comment to share here, or join the new chat thread about top teaching tools.

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Pathwright — Design a learning path

Pathwright is one of the best-kept secrets among teaching tools. Launched by a nimble South Carolina startup, it’s a simpler, sleeker alternative to complicated learning management systems like Blackboard or D2L. It’s more elegant and flexible than Google Classroom.

Rather than giving students dozens of menus to choose from, Pathwright lets you create a simple learning path to follow one step at a time. You can create a path with a few steps for guided independent learning, or set up a full online course that’s easy to navigate. I like making mini courses that students or readers can complete in an hour to quickly learn something new.

Any learning step you create can include a reading, video, activity, assessment, embed, or any other interaction. Learning paths offer a visually delightful alternative to clunkier systems. They work well for professional development, and I’ve found Pathwright works well for remote journalism training.

Figjam — Spark visual thinking with collaborative whiteboards

When Google shut down Jamboard and Microsoft discontinued Flipgrid, teachers went searching for lively alternative tools. Figjam came to the rescue. Digital whiteboards enable the kind of open-ended visual thinking that’s invaluable, whether you’re teaching about historical networks, systems thinking, scientific processes, or anything requiring students to explore connections and relationships.

The platform is free for educators. Figjam also has new AI capabilities, allowing you to instantly categorize student comments or transform a scattered brainstorm into an organized handout. You can even use Figjam for presentations. To add color and bring boards to life, Figjam includes playful stickers, stamps, and templates specifically designed for teaching and learning — from icebreakers to built-in timers.

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Gamma — Craft superb presentations

Consider replacing PowerPoint or Google Slides with Gamma. You’ll save time preparing slides and they’ll be more engaging for students. Create vertical, square or horizontal slides. Import existing PDFs or PowerPoint slide decks.

Unlike PowerPoint, Gamma makes it easy to embed live websites, videos or data visualizations inside your slides to make them stand out. You can even use Gamma to build simple sites, social posts, or interactive lessons.

Gamma works well without any AI features, for a traditional deck. Or use its AI to jumpstart a new presentation from an outline, text prompt or document you upload. You can export whatever you design to Google Slides or PowerPoint. Or share a link to your presentation. It’s free for educators to get started.

• Here’s a quick example deck I made about journalism tools.

• Before Gamma’s most recent popularity boom, I interviewed CEO Grant Lee about why he started the company, which now has 70 million users and a $2.1 Billion valuation.

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Genially — Create interactive handouts

Genially is terrific for creating interactive lessons. Add clickable hotspots to any image, timeline, map, or other image. When students interact with your creation, they’ll see informational pop-ups, links, videos, audio files, instructions, or whatever you’ve added. These hotspots transform static visuals — like simple maps or timelines — into engaging, exploratory learning elements. You don’t have to code anything — it’s easy for tech novices to use.

I’ve used Genially to turn old handouts into resources with embedded audio. Students can click on images to hear brief recorded explanations or anecdotes.

Examples: I’ve shared tips for day one of teaching, and introduced past cohorts of our entrepreneurial journalism program.

The free version works well for teachers. You can invite an unlimited number of students into your workspace for free, and Genially is grounded in student privacy. It takes a bit of experimenting to get comfortable with the interface, but once you understand the basics, you can transform dry handouts into interactive, engaging learning materials.

NotebookLM — Organize and build on your teaching materials

NotebookLM is a free tool from Google that lets you apply AI to any collection of documents. It’s super useful for searching through your teaching materials, but also for strengthening and repurposing them.

You can have 100 notebooks in a free NotebookLM account, and each notebook can have 50 sources in it. A source can be a PDF, Word Doc, image, audio file, link or a Google Drive file (Docs, Sheets, or Slides). Each file can be up to 200 MB or 500,000 words. That’s much more than what you can typically upload with Claude or ChatGPT, although limits differ by plan.

In any given notebook, you can fit dozens of lesson plans, handouts, syllabi, slides, rubrics, or even handwritten notes or voice recordings. NotebookLM makes everything instantly searchable and remixable. Here’s an example notebook about NotebookLM itself.

NotebookLM’s semantic search can find things in your materials based on level, topic, style or other characteristics. A simple Control-F search can’t do that. You can also use it to adapt teaching materials into new formats. Turn a dense reading into an engaging audio overview students can listen to, or transform a handout into a colorful infographic or slide deck.

Students can create their own free notebooks and generate flashcards and interactive quizzes to help with studying. They can also use mind maps, infographics, or timelines to visualize connections across topics.

You can create separate notebooks for each course you teach, or organize one for administrative tasks and another for curriculum development. NotebookLM works only from your uploaded sources — not generic web content. Citations for each query ensure you can validate information and see where it came from.

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Subscription invitation for teachers: I’m glad to always offer free access to all readers to this newsletter, including teachers. If you’re a teacher who would like to join the Wonder Tools inner circle to gain access to live workshops and free AI tools for teachers, you’re invited this week to join at a 20% discount for educators with a .edu email address to celebrate this new series. Reply to this email for the code.

More than 600,000 podcasts released 27 million episodes in 2025. Keeping up with even a tiny fraction of those 70,000+ daily releases is impossible. So I’ve been exploring new ways to keep up with audio: podcast summaries, audio digests, and cool new tools for finding and saving audio highlights.

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Podsnacks — Get podcast summaries by email

Get podcast summaries delivered to your email. Catch up on shows you don’t have time to listen to. The free digest includes AI-generated summaries drawn from 25 of the most popular news, business, and tech podcasts. For $5/month, you can get a daily digest of any five podcasts you want. Snipcast is an alternative that offers 2 summaries a month for free or 50 episode summaries for $8/month.

TL;DL by Headliner — Listen to podcast digests

If you want to listen to podcast summaries, try TL;DL. Pick up to five podcasts to summarize in 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes. I like that it’s not just an AI-voiced synthesis, but includes excerpted audio clips. You can always click through to hear the full episode. Caveat: expect to wait at least five minutes for each summary, and it’s still in beta. I run into occasional errors.

Examples: Listen to this summary from my recent podcast interview with . Or try this summary of an episode of ’s terrific Hidden Brain podcast.

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Snipd — My favorite podcast app

Snipd keeps improving. I rely on it mainly because it lets me save highlights from podcasts I’m listening to by tapping my AirPods. The app also provides detailed podcast summaries so I can decide what to listen to. Among the new features I like most:

• Skip intros and outros that clutter up many podcasts.

• AI chat with any episode to ask for best quotes, must-listen moments, key takeaways, clarification of a complex idea, or whatever else you want.

• I love the new “mentioned books” tab. It shows all the books discussed on a particular podcast. Click on a cover to learn more about the author and to see a list of podcasts where that book was discussed.

• Search by guest. Find and listen to all the podcasts where your favorite author/musician/guru has been interviewed.

• Listen and highlight audiobooks. Connect a Libro.fm audiobook account and import books with one click to listen to and highlight on Snipd. (Libro supports your local bookstore). Alternatively, find free public domain audiobooks at LibriVox. You can manually upload your own audiobooks.

Podcast Magic — Save a key audio moment

When you’re listening to a podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and want to save a highlight, take a screenshot and email it to podcastmagic@sublime.app. You’ll get emailed back an audio clip and transcript of the key moment to save or share. It’s a clever way to easily save and share a quote or anecdote.

Example: One show I highlighted recently was Audio Flux, which The New Yorker picked as one of the 10 best podcasts of 2025. The all-star audio duo commissions and spotlights bold, short-form audio stories. (You can also follow on Substack).

Listen Notes Search for podcast mentions

Find podcast episodes where you’re mentioned. Type in your name or the name of your organization and search. Or look for interviews with a favorite author or musician. Other useful features:

• Curated Lists: See recommendations from publications, like the 6 health care podcasts or 7 podcasts for bookworms the NYTimes recommended.

• Listen Later: Make and share a curated podcast playlist. The playlist has an RSS feed that you can add to any major podcast player. Here’s a playlist of a few shows I like. Here’s a longer list of my favorites.

Podchaser is a good alternative when you’re looking by topic. I discovered new podcasts about tennis and classical music. Also try the new advanced search by combining terms.

EarBuds Podcast Collective, founded by podcast guru , shares well-curated podcast recommendations. Each week a guest picks five shows to recommend. Example: 5 podcasts about bodies and how we see ourselves. Also: CBC’s Podcast Playlist (RIP) was a great show featuring highlights from all sorts of podcasts. The archive is full of great episodes.

Perplexity Voice Mode for Web, iOS and Android

When I don’t have my computer, I prefer searching with my voice to thumb typing on my phone. Querying Perplexity verbally when I’m walking or when my fingers are freezing is convenient because it answers with audio quickly and accurately. I can ask follow-ups for clarification or elaboration. These iterative search conversations let me steer the exploration toward what’s most useful.

Example: a screenshot of Perplexity’s short reply when I asked what voice search is useful for. Tip: ask Perplexity for its sources to verify its results; voice searches don’t surface those unless you ask.

Voicebox — Collect audio feedback

Create your own inbox for voice input. Give anyone your Voicebox link or QR code, and they can leave you an audio message. No typing, no downloads, no forms to fill out. They just share their thoughts in a simple voice memo. It’s like an answering machine for the digital era. Voicebox is marketed as a B2B tool, but anyone can use it as an individual.

Try it: Leave me a voice message about one thing you do that AI will never be able to replicate. Optionally include your name and email.

Send me a voice message

Send an audio note: Tuttu is a super simple free site where you can record and share a voice note. Then email a link to that audio or embed it. Here’s a quick example I recorded about 3 ways you can use Tuttu.

Alternative: VideoAsk is a slick tool for collecting video or audio feedback instead of a dull form. You can gather 20 minutes of input each month for free. Collecting 100 monthly minutes costs $24/month billed annually.

Rover AI — Get audio briefs to answer questions

Rover is an early-stage app that answers your questions with AI-generated audio briefs. Type in a query, wait a few minutes, then listen to your 2-3 minute audio conversation between two AI hosts. Unique feature: Choose from three alternative responses to your query. Example: Listen to a short audio debate about whether Jonathan Franzen is overrated or a genius.

Alternatives: NotebookLM, which I’ve written about, does a fantastic job of creating audio summaries —or even debates— exploring complex topics. And Huxe, which I wrote about last week, creates useful personalized audio updates. Rover is an earlier-stage experiment, by contrast, focused on brief audio answers to eclectic queries. Become a tester to try it out.

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• Huxe Personalized audio shows drawn from your interests, calendar, & email

• Google CC A morning summary of your email inbox

• Yutori Scouts AI agents that monitor your fave topics and deliver reports

Read on for examples of how each works, and how to make the most of them.

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Huxe — Personalized Audio Updates

Huxe is a personalized audio app. Whenever I open it I hear a custom podcast it generates on the spot based on my interests, calendar and email. It greets me with what’s important on my calendar and in my inbox. Then the little radio show made for me shares news and feature stories on topics I’m interested in — from AI and tech to teaching and classical music.

Huxe was co-founded in September by Raiza Martin, who left Google after leading the vision and development of NotebookLM, my favorite AI tool.

To set up the Huxe app I picked from a list of categories and added some keywords for topics, teams and tech that interest me. I also gave it permission to access my Google Calendar and Gmail. (Connecting those accounts is optional). Huxe is free for now, on iOS or Android. Follow Huxe on LinkedIn where they post interesting updates.

In addition to a new “for you” audio update generated anytime I open the app, Huxe also has a Discover tab for listening to audio shows curated from online content. Examples of ones I like:

• Product Drops highlights notable new tech, referencing posts on Product Hunt, the best hub online for new launches

• Actually Useful has mini case studies about when AI is demonstrably helpful

• The Tennis Daily gives me interesting updates during the Australian Open

Design your own briefing

• Start by pressing the “+” button at the bottom right of the interface

• On the Research tab, type in a prompt like “What are the latest breast cancer research developments?” or “Newest snack trends in Tokyo?”

• Alternatively, hit the “Use Sources” tab and add a list of specific sites you like, X handles, RSS feeds, or subreddits.

Ideas to try

• Create a personalized learning show with your favorite blogs, newsletter writers, or subreddits you follow. You can add an instruction to give the show a particular focus, tone, or style.

• Make a guilty pleasure show for stressful days. It can be as niche as you want — it’s just for you. No one has to know what’s in it, though you can choose to share it. Add a list of topics that amuse you, from hobbies to food, pet, or sport trends. Or pick guilty pleasures like favorite TV shows, snacks, or singers.

• Example: In 60 seconds I curated my own show called Reddit’s Daily Glow based on a few subreddits with inspiring news and interesting facts.

I used to listen only to podcasts or audiobooks on my commute, but now I mix in these personalized audio updates depending on my mood.

Customize your briefings

• Use the “Join” button while listening to anything to inject a live question into the show. Like the interactive audio feature in NotebookLM, it prompts the AI to respond to your query before returning to the audio briefing.

• In the settings tab, choose two voices you prefer from 19 options.

Features I hope will be added: I’d like to be able to rewind and jump around more easily in the briefings. Down the road I’d love to pull in podcast, YouTube, and newsletter subscriptions as source material, and get Huxe updates by email or WhatsApp. I’d also love to use Huxe as a curator to create my own shows, mixing in my own voice and content.

Alternative: I like Mailbrew for creating curated email digests from my favorite newsletters, blogs, subreddits, YouTubers, and more. Read my guide (for paid Wonder Tools subscribers) for more on why I like it and how I use it.

Another alternative for a quick news overview is Upstract. But that’s basically the entire Internet on one page, which I find overwhelming.

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To avoid doomscrolling, I made a little Uplifting News page that updates from Reddit. I also mocked up a landing page to help educators with AI. Both took a few minutes. Neither required any special expertise. Just an idea.

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Google CC — A Personalized Daily Email Update

I’m testing a new Google “AI productivity agent.” It’s basically a personalized briefing Gmail now sends me daily. It’s based on new Gmail messages and what’s in my Calendar. Join the waitlist.

What’s useful about it

• It saves me from missing out. It surfaces messages I might otherwise overlook. Examples so far: a library message about a reserved book ready for pickup, and a volunteering sign-up deadline.

• It links directly to key messages. You can click on any briefing item to open the relevant Gmail message.

• I can reply to customize future briefings. I replied to a briefing asking for Substack-related email updates I might have missed, and it gave me these useful nuggets.

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Yutori Scouts — Get Customized Reports

Get updates on whatever interests you. Create a detailed query and a team of AI agents will scour the web to keep you up to date. Specify news, shopping, or professional passions, or get updates on particular products, companies, or opportunities. Set your preferred frequency to daily, weekly, or when new info arises. It’s like a more powerful, AI-enhanced version of Google Alerts, which just searches for keywords. Here’s more on how Yutori’s AI agents work.

How I’m using it…

• To get an inspiring daily story from Reddit. Here’s a recent example.

• To see which AI startups are trending on Product Hunt. (You can remix public queries, which serve as useful templates).

• To keep up with new AI policies in higher ed. I set up a weekly digest to stay up to date for my job at the City University of NY. Here’s a recent update. And this brief video 📺 shows Yutori’s AI agents quickly researching, editing, and delivering the report.👇

More examples of what Scouts can monitor

• Niche clothing trends in Tokyo

• TikTok U.S. daily trends

• Highly-rated new movies available to stream

Pricing: Free for one active query; $15/month for 10 scouts on various topics with up to hourly monitoring.

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It was a delight talking with him, not just because he’s a successful entrepreneur, author, and interviewer, but because we share quirky tech tastes.

Azeem and his team publish Exponential View — a Substack with 140,000+ subscribers — about how tech is shaping our future. In our live conversation, we talked about Azeem’s AI — and analog — workflow. The discussion also touched on 18 sites, apps, and gadgets summarized below.

📺 Watch the video for the full chat, or check the highlights and tool list below.

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🔎 On AI Research Beyond Google and Wikipedia

Azeem consistently tweaks how he figures out where tech is heading. Check his “Boom or Bubble” dashboard on whether the AI market is overheated for an example of his analysis.

Key takeaway: Azeem’s research workflow has moved almost entirely away from traditional search:

• Why he quit Google and Wikipedia. [16:20] “I spend virtually no time on Google searching for things, nothing on Wikipedia at all, not a moment now.” Instead, he surfaces what matters to him with AI searches and custom tools his team has developed.

• Manus is his research assistant. Azeem and his team use Manus (a Chinese-founded AI startup recently acquired by Meta) the way you’d send a research assistant to “find color—go off and find the case studies, the anecdotes, the famous quotations.” The team runs queries overnight for 30-40 minutes each.

• Shortwave helps with investor intel. This AI tool is superb for searching within your email. Azeem has 40 startup investments. To support founders, he uses Shortwave to search past email to help explore questions like, “How well are they sticking to their milestones? Have they changed the goalposts? Where do they seem to have problems where I can be helpful?” Azeem uses Shortwave to search across 15 years of Gmail messages.

• Julius is a resource for data science. He uses this tool, which he’s invested in, as an AI number cruncher. [My post on Julius]

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🤖 How Azeem Uses AI

Azeem set up custom instructions directing ChatGPT to aggressively challenge his assumptions: [6:41] “It can be quite exhausting… it’s like being constantly interrogated.” His follow-up? “I often have to copy the answer and put it into Claude and say, explain this to me like I’m a bright high schooler.” He considers Claude the best coding model and also uses it for text refinement.

Bottom line: Azeem uses the two AI models sequentially to force himself to think deeper.

Other AI Assistants

1. Gemini Pro Azeem builds interactive apps with Gemini. “I might explain what I’m looking for, have a discussion, then ask it to build the interactive platform app. Then I can play with the parameters.”

2. Perplexity Azeem’s go-to for “instant answers” when he doesn’t need deep research.

3. DeepSeek Azeem’s default for “good enough” queries to cut costs. “In general, it’s really good enough. And if on the occasion I don’t think it is, I can fire it out to one of the other models.”

4. Grok Azeem experiments with this occasionally as part of his testing.

✒️ “I Dip the Pen in this Bottle of Ink”

Azeem has a fountain pen without an internal ink cartridge. Why?

[9:30] “If I am writing and every 10 or 15 words I have to stop to dip the pen in ink, I’m slowing myself down... In a world where I can move really quickly, I will slow myself down. I’ll get very haptic in the experience and look at what I’m writing and force myself to cross out mistakes, and feel frustrated about mistakes, so therefore slow my thinking down even more.”

In a conversation about AI acceleration, Azeem deliberately builds in friction.

🎙️Voice and Writing Tools 🖊️

1. Wispr Flow Azeem reads his handwritten notes aloud into Wispr Flow, editing in real-time as he speaks.

2. Kolo Tino Fountain Pen Azeem likes the feel of pen on paper and its deliberate pace.

3. Paper Republic Trifold Leather Journal Azeem’s folio holds three separate notebook inserts: “You can have one that’s just for your jotting of your to-do list and then others are for thinking time.”

😰 Azeem: “Are You a Bit Stressed, Jeremy?” 😖

In our recent conversation, Azeem teased me for repeatedly referencing resources for relaxation.

“Are you a bit stressed? Because you’ve talked to me about your squeeze ball. You’ve talked to me about Headspace for meditating. You’ve talked to me about your CMY cube to chill you out. I don’t want to go all shrink on you, but there’s a little hint of intensity there.”

Fair point. I do have a lot of calming tchotchkes on my desk. We both shared a bunch of tools we use, analog and digital, for coping with busy-ness and overwhelm. Below are three Azeem recommends:

Focus & Wellness

1. Pzizz Azeem’s most-used app: “[The app’s] run time is probably 10 hours a week on average and has done for a decade.” He paid $50 for a lifetime subscription and uses it for naps, overnight flights, and jet lag recovery.

2. Oura ring Azeem uses this for health tracking, as have I, since I first wrote about it in 2021.

3. Lacrosse ball Azeem’s essential travel item: “A really hard lacrosse ball to put into your pressure points, like your glutes and your hip flexors, because you want to do that massage, especially once you’ve been on your second 10-hour flight in five days.”

🎧 High-End Audio: Headphones and DJ Mixing

Azeem tests headphones with “Sultans of Swing,” a song by Dire Straits, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, as well as dance tracks.

1. Solitaire T Headphones Azeem travels with these for high-end sound with noise cancelling for long flights.

2. Beats Fit Pro His everyday choice.

3. DJ Studio Azeem uses this digital audio workstation to create DJ mixes while traveling.

🌟 Notable Quotes

• Azeem on the skyrocketing cost of cutting-edge AI: “All of this is expensive. I mean, we spend as a team, I would say probably between $350 and $500 per person per month.”

  • My take: we’re nearing a new digital divide. Free alternatives like Jan AI help (see my post), but if you use the best contemporary AI models, your bills add up fast.

• Azeem on why no single AI company will “win” the market. "I haven't seen a strong reason to think that a network effect will emerge.”

  • His rationale: “If you get the unique data for clown makeup, and I get the unique data for vineyards in Italy, if I'm not interested in clowns, I'm not going to use your LLM.”

• Azeem says OpenAI’s strategic dilemma, as reported by The Information, is whether to focus on power users or those who just want quick replies.

  • [29:23] “They have 1,000 researchers who have built amazing deep research tools, and most people just want to know which movie should I watch tonight, or draw my dad as if he was Spider-Man for his 70th birthday card.”

• On accountability in the AI era: “We’ve essentially said to the team that we don’t have hallucinations at Exponential View because everything is owned by a person. If you copy and paste something out of an LLM that’s got a hallucination in it, that’s you saying it, that’s not the LLM saying it.”

• On the swift pace of change: “I would think that 70% to 80% of my workflows today, the things that I do, are different to how I did them three months ago.”

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Thank you to , , , , , and many others for tuning into the live video conversation with .

You’re Invited! Join me next Wednesday, January 21 at 10am EST for Just Start Writing: Tools For Busy Creators In 2026, a free workshop I’m leading for Medium.com.

2026 is already overflowing with new and improved sites and services. In today’s post I’m sharing five I’ve tested and found particularly useful.

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Kraa — Make Gorgeous Documents

I love minimalist tools like the free Kraa, a wonderful new digital writing surface. I’ve started experimenting with creating quick, simple pages, which Kraa calls “leaves.”

The example pages shared by Kraa’s founding team will give you a feel for it:

• A news story with an image gallery, pull quotes, and comments

• A blog post with images, quotes, and comments

• A portfolio or brand page with big images and less text

• A welcome page about Kraa that I’ve customized a bit. I added a chat at the bottom so you can try it out and add your own comment about Kraa.

Ideas for using Kraa

• Make a travel page to share pictures and stories from a trip. Benefit: Easier than creating a whole Wordpress site, and much prettier than a Google or Word Doc.

• Create an impromptu, elegant, free live running chat for a meeting or event, like the Kraa team’s public chat page. Benefit: Faster, freer, easier, and more elegant than other tools for creating a running chat page.

• Write a manifesto or blog post about something you care about. Benefit: Get more design flexibility than you would with Wordpress, Craft, or Medium.

Leonardo AI Blueprints — A Shortcut for AI Visuals

Sophisticated image editing with AI usually requires careful prompting. What I like about Leonardo AI’s new Blueprints feature is that you can just upload an image and pick from dozens of styles, without knowing what words to use in a prompt. You can transform boring or sloppy headshots into creative images. Here’s an experiment with one of my headshots, and another.

Leonardo, now owned by Canva, also has lots of other useful features.

• The platform hosts multiple AI image and video generators, including Flux, Gemini, Ideogram, and Sora.

• Flow State lets you type in a prompt and pick from dozens of resulting AI visuals. If you see one you like, you can select “more like this.”

• Upscaler enhances images’ resolution and size, which is useful if you’re printing pictures or showing them on a big screen.

Pricing: Free for up to 150 fast image creations a day. $10/month billed annually for more images, private images, better AI models, and other pro features.

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YouTube to NotebookLM: Import a Whole Playlist or Channel in One Click

YouTube to NotebookLM is a remarkably useful new Chrome extension that lets you bulk-add any YouTube playlists, channels, or search results into NotebookLM. for AI-powered analysis.

How to use it: Install the free Chrome extension. Then navigate to a YouTube channel or playlist of interest, or even a YouTube search result. Click the bookmarklet you’ve installed in your browser to import the entire batch of videos into a new or existing NotebookLM notebook. (The free version of NotebookLM allows a maximum of 50 sources in a notebook).

What I tested: I pulled in 80 of my own YouTube channel videos into a new notebook with one click. I was surprised at how quick and easy it was. I immediately started analyzing the video collection and generating a report.

What to try

• Find or create YouTube playlists on topics of interest. Then use this extension to ingest those playlists into NotebookLM. The videos are automatically indexed, and within minutes you can create reports, slides, and infographics to enhance your learning.

• Summarize a playlist or channel with an audio or video overview. Or create quizzes, flash cards, data tables, or mind maps to explore a batch of YouTube videos. Or have a chat in NotebookLM with your favorite video channel. Check my recent post for some YouTube channels to try.

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Agenda Hero: Add Anything to Your Calendar

Ever get a flyer with upcoming events, or a sports schedule, or a list of upcoming meetings, and face the tedious task of manually adding each event to your calendar? Agenda Hero solves this pain point delightfully.

What it does

• Scans physical or digital event lists and adds them to your calendar

• Works with photos, PDFs, scans, emails, or pasted text

• Works with calendars from Google, Apple, or Outlook, or Office 365

• Use the Chrome Extension to clip event dates and times from the Web or use the free iOS or Android app to add events from your phone.

• Capture schedules from school handouts, work training dates, or concert listings.

How it saves time: Instead of spending 10-20 minutes adding events one by one, snap a photo or upload a document. Agenda Hero extracts the events and lets you add them in bulk to your calendar.

Real-world example: My daughter and I like going to occasional Columbia Women’s Basketball team games. So we took a picture of their schedule card. Agenda Hero quickly imported all the dates. Now they’re on my calendar instead of on a piece of paper in a drawer. You can share a link to your event list, like this one I created for the upcoming home games.

Bonus features

• Create and share a customized event page for your group

• Use AI chat to batch edit a bunch of events

Pricing: Free for most features, or $30/annually for unlimited AI edits and custom URLs and colors for your shared pages.

Credit for pointing me to Agenda Hero goes to my friend JR Raphael’s excellent Cool Tools newsletter, part of The Intelligence. He spotlighted it as a favorite tool of 2025.

Happenstance — Stretch your network

Find people in your networks using AI. I connected my LinkedIn and have already started using it to search for friends of friends.When I searched for new tennis fans in my network, it scanned the interests of my contacts as well as 25,000+ friends of friends to show me a bunch of people to consider reaching out to. (By the way, I’m looking for tennis partners in NYC 🎾, so reply if you are too). Sports aside, it works well if you’re looking for professional contacts in a particular place with certain skills, background, or knowledge.

Pricing: Free for unlimited connected accounts, unlimited groups, and searching. $24/month billed annually for unlimited searches and other pro features.

What’s new in your toolkit?

Share a new tool you’re exploring by leaving a comment below.

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Can you tell it’s AI?

• Which Face is Real? AI slop is everywhere. Can you spot it? This little game from the “Calling Bullsh-t” project is surprisingly tricky. The AI images come from ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, a collection of visual slop.

• AI or Not? is a collection of quick games to test your skill at detecting AI images, music, and video.

• Google’s Lab has dozens of AI experiments, including Odd One Out, an AI art detection game, and Say What You See, for testing your prompting skill.

• SynthID is Google’s new AI Detection resource for identifying multimedia made with Gemini AI. To assess whether text is AI generated, try Pangram.

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Smart takes on journalism and tech

Predictions for Journalism 2026 Read Nieman Lab’s terrific collection of short, provocative pieces, then visit the Best of 2025 and Stories to Inspire you in 2026 from Nieman Storyboard, a sister publication highlighting great narrative journalism. Nieman’s gift guide for journalists is a nice list for future presents. Also check out Amy Webb’s smart annual letter on what’s ahead for 2026.

Most Viewed Wonder Tools posts of 2025👇

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📺 Watch these 4 YouTubers for smart AI tips

Matt Wolfe, SkillLeap AI, AI Advantage, and Grace Leung are superb YouTubers I’ve learned from recently. Each shows you how to use AI tools with specific examples, prompts and resources, like these 70 image prompts from Saj Adib, who runs the SkillLeap AI channel.

… and practical wisdom

’s YouTube channel has consistently excellent videos (about 12 minutes long) like “Life Advice that Sounds Good but Will Destroy You” and “40 Harsh Truths I Wish I Knew in My 20s.”

Photos to make you smile

Nature’s Best Science Images of 2025 I stumbled on these delightful images on the wonderfully-curated Kottke.org. The image below, by 13-year-old Grayson Bell, appears in the Nature collection and won recognition from the Comedy Wildlife Awards 2025.

A podcast to make you smile

Season 2

Listen to ‘s hilarious exploration of what happens when a team of AI bots collaborates to make an AI bot company.

Bonus: A little game for you — can you draw a perfect circle?

My new 30-second game for wasting time resetting your focus.

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Summary: I’ve relied on these 10 tools in 2025 as a team of AI assistants. They’ve helped me experiment more and explore new ways of working.

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What’s one of your favorites not on this list? Or your favorite way to use one of these? Leave a comment to share 👇

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1. NotebookLM: Explore Your Own Notes 📓

Create a free AI-enhanced notebook for any topic you’re exploring. Import up to 50 large docs or files and turn them into infographics, slides, reports, quizzes, or, as of Dec 18 — data tables. See examples from my 2024 post, or read my new guide for a full update + how-to. 👇

2. Claude: Tackle Projects and Make Your Own Apps 📂

This is my go-to AI assistant. I use Claude Projects to get personalized input based on instructions I provide and notes and files I upload. I never have to start a prompt from scratch because Claude already has extensive context. I’ve been using Claude to make weekly apps, like a NotebookLM assistant, an alt-text generator, and an ear training music game. Read my 2024 guide to Claude Projects for background, then my new guide to making apps with Claude Artifacts. 👇

3. Granola: Summarize any Meeting or Live Event 📝

I rely on Granola for live AI-assisted note-taking during meetings, conference sessions, and interviews. I take notes in the app while it transcribes. Afterward I can toggle between my notes and an AI summary generated from the full transcript with my notes woven in.

The resulting summaries are excellent. I group related notes in folders so when I later query the Granola AI assistant, it can draw from all the related meetings. Read more: How Granola fits into my conference toolkit

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4. Perplexity: Find Relevant Info 🔎

I consider Perplexity my briefing assistant. It helps me quickly get up to speed on any topic with a concise summary and helpful sources to dig into. See how and why that’s so useful in my prior post, then read my 2025 update.

5. Gemini: Learn About Anything 🧠

Sometimes you want questions, not answers. When you’re aiming to learn something deeply, Gemini’s Guided Learning walks you through the topic like a patient teacher. It asks you questions, quizzes you, generates infographics and web pages for you, and lets you steer the exploration so you actually learn.

Gemini’s new image model, Nano Banana Pro, is terrific for making images and infographics. It’s great for generating learning materials.

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6. Ideogram: Design Engaging Images 🖼️

Make posters, graphics, logos, and illustrations to enhance documents, presentations, reports, or social posts.

7. Superhuman: Process Email Efficiently 💨

Superhuman saves me an hour a week on email. It loads messages faster than other email services, and I rely on its keyboard shortcuts and calendar integration, e.g. for quickly creating calendar events from emails.

8. Craft: Design Attractive Documents 🎨

I love using Craft to make digital handouts. These visual docs with colorful cover cards feel friendlier than long text blocks.

I generally use Craft without AI, but you can now apply AI to your Craft notes and docs, or even access them from your preferred AI assistant.

9. Gamma: Make Compelling Slides 💻

Gamma is the fastest tool for converting a document into an attractive, professional-looking deck. (NotebookLM has recently become another great option for this). You can even use Gamma to make simple websites as easily as you’d make a slide deck.

10. ChatGPT: Keeps Getting Better ✨

The December update to ChatGPT’s image tools makes it one of the best options for creating visuals. Repair an old photo, polish your resume profile picture, or make an illustration for a project or publication.

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I rely on Ideogram, an AI image generator, to help me create posters, banners, social posts, newsletter illustrations, and video thumbnails.

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Context: Ideogram competes in an exploding market. Gemini’s new Nano Banana Pro makes remarkable infographics, ChatGPT’s image generator produces fantastic illustrations, and Canva, Adobe, and Midjourney keep getting stronger. Yet I still find myself returning often to Ideogram. Read on for 10 reasons why — and a guide to getting started.

10 reasons I like Ideogram 

1. Your prompt gets automatically improved. Ideogram’s magic prompt algorithm refines your initial query. You can then approve it or revise. 

2. Choose from four options. Each time you submit a prompt, you get back four generated images. Getting to choose one gives you a bit of editorial input.

3. Public image galleries are helpful for inspiration. Build on others’ prompts. Browse images of all shapes & styles, and top-ranked images, for ideas.

4. Get accurate text within images. Ideogram generates accurate text for social media graphics, thumbnails, banners, and logos. Ideogram’s guidance on text & typography includes excellent examples of prompts and text designs.

5. Pick from a variety of styles. Choose from dozens of styles, from Pop Art and Watercolor to Doodle, Travel Poster, and Surreal Collage. I often choose “auto” because I can’t make up my mind. I tend to opt for a clean, modern look for a presentation image, or a more abstract, artsy vibe for creative projects.

6. Use negative prompts. Paid subscribers can list specific elements NOT to be included in an image. That can be helpful if a particular detail could prevent your image from being usable, as in the burger example below.

7. Choose your image orientation. You can generate horizontal, vertical, or square images. Free users have 11 orientation options. That’s helpful for generating images that will fit your slide, podcast, newsletter, ad banner, site header, or whatever else. Paid subscribers get additional dimension choices.

8. Remix anything. Modify images you or others have generated with Ideogram’s remix button. I often tweak what I’ve generated to get closer to what I want. Be specific with your remix query: “dog” may yield a golden retriever instead of the poodle you envisioned.

9. Extend images. Ideogram’s Canvas feature lets paid users edit, extend, or combine images. Here’s a 45-second video with examples.

10. Create custom styles of your own Upload or pick a few images to generate a new style you can use repeatedly for a consistent look. 📺 Watch the promo video below to get a sense of it.👇  

How to start using Ideogram

1. Visit Ideogram.ai and sign up for free with your Google, Apple or Microsoft account.

2. Check the welcome guide for starting tips, examples, and sample prompts.

3. Explore the public gallery to see others’ images and the prompts they used.

4. Describe an image you envision in a few sentences. Don’t worry about precise wording. You can opt to let Ideogram refine your prompt.

5. Choose a style. Decide if you want an illustrated or photographic-style image. Or pick ‘auto’ to let the algorithm decide. You can also select a color palette.

6. Choose dimensions. Pick a wide, vertical or square image. I mostly generate wide images, which match the width of presentations or web pages.

7. Click generate. On a free account, you can generate a limited number of images per day.

8. Wait a minute. The service slows free requests to incentivize upgrades.

9. Download the image you like and use it any way you choose.

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Use an AI assistant to sharpen your image prompts

Avoid getting generic images when using Ideogram by prompting ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to help you craft more detailed image prompts. Here’s how to prompt an AI assistant for this:

• Type a few descriptive phrases about an image you’re envisioning

• Explain how you plan to use the image (for a poster a thumbnail, etc)

• Ask for five surprising, bold, image prompts based on your context for use with your image generation tool.

• Iterate. Pick one you like and ask for three compelling variants. Test one or more of those with Ideogram.

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Pricing

• Free for a limited number of image generation credits each day. Depending on traffic to Ideogram, you can expect at least five free images a day. I started on the free plan but now pay for the service

• $7/month billed annually for more images, quicker rendering, and advanced features like Canvas, which lets you modify & extend images.

Ideogram caveats

1. Limited free images. I often have to iterate on a prompt several times before getting something usable. On a free plan that may mean getting only one or two quality images a day.

2. Reduced image quality on downloads. Free users can only download a 70% quality JPEG image, not the full-resolution version. 

3. Public image creation only. All images created on the free plan are public, meaning others can view and remix them.

Alternatives

Gemini Nano Banana Pro

Google recently launched its best image generator with a surprising name and remarkable versatility. You can use Nano Banana Pro for nearly any kind of visual — from a logo, infographic, or slide design, to an edited self-portrait based on your photo or an abstract image of a dog (below).

ChatGPT’s Image Generator

ChatGPT’s built-in AI image generation tool is excellent, particularly for generating cartoons, simple diagrams, or abstract illustrations. You can’t specify the dimensions of an image, but you can use an extended chat to provide context and guidance, and you can ask the AI assistant to iterate on the image result if it doesn’t satisfy you with its first attempts. You can also select an area of a generated image and prompt it to change that part. Here’s my post about it.

Flux

Black Forest Labs, which makes the Flux 2 AI image generator, recently raised $300 million from investors. Flux images are dramatic and distinct. You can create 50 images for free after signing into the Flux Playground, or you can use the model on Hugging Face. Flux doesn’t require any special prompting lingo. I find Ideogram simpler to use, and it has a broader set of features, but Flux is excellent at generating accurate text inside images, and it’s a powerful tool on the rise. Here are Flux versions of the Ideogram image I created at the top of this post.

Adobe Firefly

Adobe has a growing suite of AI tools that keep getting better. Firefly has some unique capabilities. You can customize your image’s camera angle, lighting, color, tone and special effects, among other advanced features. Adobe has also committed to respecting creators by not training on their content without express permission. “Adobe Firefly models are trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired.”

Concerns about AI image generation

1. Less control. With editing tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, and Canva, you have full control over the pixels you’re designing. When you generate images with AI, you have less say over a visual’s specifics.

2. Risk of confusion. Some AI-generated images look like real people, objects, or buildings, which can be misleading if not explained. An AI-generated photo of a person in an office might be assumed to be a real employee.

3. Displacement of artists. Talented professionals may see diminishing demand for their services as people increasingly look to AI services instead of hiring creatives. And lawsuits allege that AI models were unfairly trained on human work. Getty recently lost one such suit, but others are ongoing.

4. The rise of AI sludge. With AI image generation spreading, it’s easier than ever to mass produce visual images without thought. It is also easier to imitate anyone’s visual style, so AI-powered copycats may proliferate.

5. Error prone. Some AI generation tools still can’t reliably reproduce text well. Words within images may be garbled, like this mangled poster made by DALL-E in 2024.

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Resources for non-AI images

• Creative Commons & Openverse — search for free human-made images

• The National Gallery of Art lets you download and use its images for free

• Unsplash and Pexels are free sources for photographs

• 11 tools for diversifying your images (a Wonder Tools guide)

What have you used AI images for? What works best for you? 👇

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How to set up a notebook

1. Pick a purpose. Start a new notebook for a work project or a learning goal. Examples: I created a notebook to organize materials for the new online bilingual MA program we’re developing at the CUNY Newmark Grad School of Journalism where I work. I also set up a notebook to learn more about Gustav Mahler, a composer I revere. I have numerous others for work and personal projects.

2. Find sources for your notebook. NotebookLM recently added a search panel to help you discover high-quality sources. You decide which, if any, of the suggested materials to add to your notebook. The “Fast Research” is quick and focused, unlike a generic Google search that returns hundreds of results, some of which have gamed the search engine system.

• Fast Research surfaces 10 or so documents related to your topic in less than 30 seconds. You can ask it to find sources within your Google Drive, or from the Web.

• The Deep Research prompt option in the same panel will more slowly gather many more sources.

Tip: make your query as specific as possible to surface relevant, useful sources. Here’s an example of a concise, precise query I used.

3. Add your own materials. Upload files up to 200 MB and 500,000 words into your notebook. You can add:

• Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets

• PDFs, images (including photos of your handwritten notes), and Microsoft Word documents

• YouTube links and audio, image, or video files (it extracts the transcript)

• Website URLs (it extracts the text)

No other AI tool I’ve used lets you compile as many different kinds of materials in a centralized AI workspace that’s easy to explore and build with.

• Free accounts can create up to 100 notebooks, with 50 sources in each. On a free plan, you may run into limits when creating multimedia materials. You can run free 10 Deep Research queries a month. Students in the U.S. 18 or older can get pro access for free.

• Pro accounts, which cost $20/month as part of Google AI Pro, can host 500 notebooks with 300 sources in each. They can run 20 Deep Research queries a day.

Collaborate and share

NotebookLM now lets you collaborate as you would with Google Docs. You can choose to invite people as viewers or editors. Give them a full view of your sources and notes, or limit their access to the search/chat interface.

You can also publish notebooks publicly. Here are some examples:

• Trends in health, wealth and happiness by Our World in Data

• How to build a life, from The Atlantic

• Shakespeare’s Complete Plays

• Parenting Advice for the Digital Age, by of Techno Sapiens

• Earnings Reports for the World’s 50 Biggest Companies

• Secrets of the Super Agers by Eric Topol

Explore your materials

As you add materials, NotebookLM analyzes them and suggests relevant questions. After I uploaded biographical material about Mahler, it suggested search queries — based on the source documents — about why he converted to Catholicism and what poetry collections inspired him. You can also ask any question on your mind or type in any kind of traditional search query.

NotebookLM uses natural language processing to make sense of your documents. When you type in a query, the system understands what you’re looking for. When I queried about the death of Mahler’s loved ones, I didn’t have to mention their names or even their relationship to him — NotebookLM understood what I was asking. These exploratory searches are more powerful than old-fashioned keyword searches, which only work if an exact word combination appears in your document. NotebookLM makes it easy to run abstract queries as well, searching for moments of anger or surprise.

Tip: target specific sources. You can use the checkboxes next to each source to limit your search to particular documents. This precision is handy when you want to search within a specific report or compare information across just two or three key documents.

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Visualize information

Use the Studio tab to create shareable reports, slides, graphics, and multimedia out of your notebook material. Unlike other AI tools, NotebookLM’s creations are grounded in your source documents — they don’t pull from the Web or generic training data. Because they draw only from your source material, the creations will change as you add more to your notebook, or if you mark only a subset of sources to be used.

Create a mind map first to get an overview of the topics covered in a notebook. Then create the following elements to understand and share your material.

Infographics

Create polished visual summaries. Choose whether you want a landscape, portrait, or square image, and how simple or detailed it should be. Then type in an optional custom prompt to guide the design. You can include instructions about your preferred color palette, target audience, illustration style, and the kinds of numbers or facts to prioritize.

A caveat: NotebookLM consistently produces clean, readable text. It’s mostly accurate, but I’ve encountered occasional errors. Here’s an example: Mahler’s age of death is wrong at the bottom of this NotebookLM infographic.

Slide decks

NotebookLM’s newest capability — generating slide decks — continues to surprise me. When I ask it to make slides summing up notebook material — it comes up with outstanding results, like this slide deck about Mahler.

You can choose between detailed standalone slides, or simpler TED-style presenter slides meant to accompany a verbal presentation. As with the infographic tool, you can just press the slide deck button to let NotebookLM decide what to generate. But you’ll get something more relevant to you if you write a prompt to guide the visual style and subject matter focus. The slides include a small NotebookLM watermark in the bottom right corner.

Below is an example of a slide deck about NotebookLM I created with NotebookLM. 👇

Building Your AI Second Brain: Unlock Your Thinking Partner — a NotebookLM Slide Deck Explainer

18.3MB ∙ PDF file

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This slide deck was generated with NotebookLM, then saved as a PDF

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A caveat: In my testing, the slides have been clean and visually engaging. They’re not perfect, though. A deck about our new bilingual journalism program, for example, included misleading AI-generated images of our faculty members.

Video overviews

Create a video summary of the material in your notebook. Think of it as an AI-narrated slide show. Fortunately, there’s no talking avatar. I like how these videos include facts, examples, quotes, and images pulled directly from your source documents.

Choose between a brief video (1-2 minutes) or a longer explainer (often six to 10 minutes). You can’t specify the exact length. Tailor the approach to your viewers with a prompt. You can even specify a specific audience, whether board members of a charity you’re presenting to, or grandchildren new to your subject matter.

Videos can take five to 10 minutes to generate. Free accounts can generate only a few videos, slide decks, or infographics per notebook before hitting a usage limit. When your video — or other creation — is ready, you can download and share it, or view it within your notebook.

📺 Here’s a video overview of NotebookLM I created with NotebookLM

Podcasts

NotebookLM’s audio overviews became Internet famous for their remarkably human-sounding conversations. When I played a clip for a group of students when this feature launched, they didn’t realize the speakers weren’t human.

Example: Here’s a new “Deep Dive” audio piece I generated about NotebookLM for this post.

• You can write a brief or detailed prompt to guide the style of the audio, and you can choose from multiple formats.

• After a few minutes, the audio file is ready for you to download and share.

• Tip: add an AI-generated label to this kind of audio or any other material you create with NotebookLM. That way people will know where it came from and won’t assume you created each detail from scratch.

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You can generate audio pieces from a subset of your documents or your full collection of sources. Here are the four kinds of audio you can generate, with an example of each:

• Debate. Here’s an audio debate I prompted NotebookLM to create about which of its features are most useful.

• Critique. Here’s a critique of NotebookLM I generated from 19 sources I added.

• Brief summary. Here’s a 90-second audio overview.

• Deep dive. Here’s a deep dive NotebookLM explainer.

Text reports

In addition to multimedia, you can generate custom reports. The reports tend to be around 2,000 to 3,000 words, or six to 12 pages. Here are example reports generated by NotebookLM: an advanced guide to NotebookLM and a guide to integrating NotebookLM in a newsroom.

I’ve found the dozens of reports I’ve generated to be thorough enough to be useful for reference or learning. They also help point to sources worth exploring further. Try prompting NotebookLM to create the following kinds of reports:

• Timelines: Organize chronological information

• FAQs: Common questions and answers about your topic

• Explainers: Break down complex concepts

• Teaching guides: Useful if you’re an educator or lead workshops

• Student handbooks: Supplemental resources

• Critiques: Analysis of weaknesses or limitations in your sources

• Debate reports: Multiple perspectives on controversial topics

Flashcards and quizzes

When learning something new, create flashcards or quizzes with multiple-choice questions to test yourself.

• Describe your level of understanding (e.g. “I’m new to this,” or “I’m a professional in this field, but I’m new to this framework,”).

• Choose whether you want small or large number of questions or flashcards.

• Specify concepts you want the quiz or flashcards to focus on.

• You can also ask NotebookLM to focus on a particular source, like a certain link, PDF, or video you’ve uploaded. Example: Check out my NotebookLM flashcards.

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5 Projects to Try

1. Organize a work project

Each time you add a file, NotebookLM summarizes it. Its full text is then searchable with citations, so you know you’re not getting AI hallucinations. To assemble a useful notebook, gather relevant documents, including:

• Plans, internal reports, or project memos

• Links to relevant sites

• Meeting recordings or transcripts

• Important emails copied and pasted or saved as PDFs or docs

• Background reports, company manuals, or competitive research

Use your project notebook to:

• Create summary reports or timelines to onboard new team members

• Draft slide decks for internal meetings

• Make infographics to visually summarize complex processes or workflows

• Quickly find relevant quotes, stats, anecdotes, or examples

• Refresh your memory when returning to the project later on

2. Plan a trip

I create travel notebooks to help me find relevant family activities and ideas for outings. I’ve done this before with Perplexity and other AI platforms, but I like the way NotebookLM lets me gather so many different kinds of inputs: links, videos, articles, and local guides—everything I might want to reference when planning weekend activities or hosting visitors. You can find these kinds of resources with a Google or Perplexity search, or do the whole process within NotebookLM.

For travel planning, compile these materials:

• Historical and cultural information

• Entertainment guides and reviews

• Restaurant recommendations

• Local blog posts, event listings, or links to top attractions

Then ask NotebookLM to generate:

• Itineraries

• FAQs about your destination

• Recommendations based on your budget or other constraints

• Slide decks or infographics to share with your travel companions

• Flashcards for learning key phrases if you’re traveling abroad

• Quiz games to play at the airport while waiting in line

3. Learn something

Here’s a meta use-case: I created a notebook about NotebookLM to help me learn about its nooks and crannies. (Try the quiz about NotebookLM it created for me.) I made another one about “deliberative dialogue” to learn more about tactics for encouraging civil discourse between people who violently disagree.

To build a learning notebook:

• Upload relevant YouTube videos, articles, and course materials.

• Use the “Add Sources” panel to add docs from your Google Drive or the Web.

• Generate mind maps, quizzes, and flashcards to test your understanding.

• Create audio guides to learn while exercising, cleaning, or commuting.

• Prompt for timelines, FAQs, explainers, infographics, and slide decks tailored to your knowledge level and learning goals.

Tip: break large documents into smaller pieces

NotebookLM uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for search. That keeps it grounded in your material and avoids hallucination. But it also means that when asked to quickly search gigantic documents, NotebookLM may have the capacity to scour only a subset of your source material.

To avoid searches that miss important material, consider breaking enormous documents into smaller pieces and narrowing your searches to specific sources or more precise subjects.

4. Compile reference guides

Build notebooks to help you handle recurring tasks.

• Grant writing. Compile successful applications, guidelines, or evaluation criteria.

• Social posts. Gather style guides, brand guidelines, and examples of past posts that have worked well for you or competitors.

• Technical documentation. Assemble specs, organizational rules, or industry best practices.

• Customer research. Add past surveys, interview transcripts, analytics reports, or testimonials. Tip: as a first step, strip names and emails from surveys or interviews to protect respondents’ privacy.

5. Manage home projects

Create notebooks for life outside of work. NotebookLM is great for this because unlike other AI tools, it lets you input so many different kinds of sources with huge file sizes, whether you have videos, audio files, PDFs, your own handwritten notes, links to various sites, or Google Drive files.

• Recipe collections and guides to various cooking techniques

• Home improvement projects with how-to articles and product reviews

• Hobby research for woodworking, guitar, photography, or gardening

Why NotebookLM Stands Out 📍

• Unlike AI assistants designed around an open-ended chat box, NotebookLM is structured around a more familiar paradigm: a searchable notebook. The closest parallels are Claude Projects or ChatGPT Projects, which allow you to organize documents in a folder that can inform AI queries on those services. Perplexity Spaces is also useful for organizing related search threads. But none of those can generate NotebookLM’s full range of outputs, and each draws on its own training data as well as your sources.

• NotebookLM’s citation system means you can trust its search results, because you can see the cited section in your original document. And it’s unique in being able to generate everything from audio and video to reports, slides and infographics from your source materials.

  • Note: Citations aren’t provided within infographics, slide decks, video or audio overviews. If there are tidbits from those you want to trace back to a source, summarize the fact or detail in question in NotebookLM’s explore tab — the chat window — to ask for a citation.

• The free tier is powerful enough for most people. And it keeps improving, adding significant new capabilities every couple of months.

• The bottom line: if I were forced to recommend a single AI tool for many different kinds of readers, I’d pick NotebookLM.

What do you use NotebookLM for? Add a comment 👇

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Read more from Wonder Tools about NotebookLM 👇

I wrote my first Wonder Tools post in April 2020 to help journalists and educators adapt to remote work.

5.5 years and 280 posts later, we’re now 80,000 people, in many different fields, discovering better ways to work with technology. You are among the subscribers whose support makes this possi…

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