Wonder Tools 🏆 Best of 2023
Wonder Tools 🏆 Best of 2023
The most useful new sites & most-shared posts. Plus tools to watch in 2024
🎊 4 of my favorite 2023 tools
Oasis is an AI dictation app that changed the way I brainstorm. It’s now my favorite tool for thinking out loud and converting loose ideas into outlines and drafts.
How it works: Oasis records, transcribes and summarizes my voice notes. It also transforms them into outlines, drafts, scripts, or social posts. I use its excellent built-in prompts or add custom instructions to convert my voice input into whatever format I need. I use it to draft lesson plans, outline newsletter posts, journal, make idea lists, and plan talks.
What I value most about Oasis
Snipd became my favorite podcast player this year. It lets me save and share highlights from a great episode by tapping my Airpods.
How it works: It drops clips I’ve highlighted into my digital notebook (works with Notion, Readwise, or other notes apps); sends me an episode summary; and gives me an AI preview of any podcast so I can prioritize my playlist.
Why I switched to Snipd and 📺 my video demo
Bloks is an AI note-taker for summarizing meetings. Having it as a backup gives me the freedom to focus on listening and thinking.
How it works: Bloks can record anything — a live, in-person meeting, a Zoom call, or dictation. Unlike other AI meeting summarizers, it doesn’t have to join the meeting because it records from your own computer. Afterwards you can ask Bloks to turn a meeting summary into an email draft, a blog post, or anything else. I’ve also asked it to translate meeting highlights. It doesn’t save audio or video, just a text transcript and summary.
Note: Fathom is a superb alternative if you need video recordings plus excellent AI summaries. Great feature: click on your AI-generated summary or full transcript to jump to that moment in the video recording. Works on Windows and Mac with Zoom, Google Meet and Teams.
Read my take on AI note-takers
Coda is the underappreciated app of the year. See its new AI capabilities in the AI gallery. Recommended ways to explore it:
Try a free AI-powered template to summarize your meeting notes or help with project, trip or meal planning.
Set up a social sharing doc that can instantly create vertical visuals for any article draft you paste in.
Create your own book list. 📚 I made a book collection page last week with the 70+ titles my book group has read. All I had to do was paste book titles into a table. The AI magically + accurately added authors, description and covers. 🤯
Read my take on Coda AI
🥇 3 of the most shared posts of 2023
1. Declutter your tasks, notes and docs
I shared my productivity toolkit in this August post. As you’re prepping for 2024, consider these simple tools for streamlining your workflow.
2. Seven Ways to Use ChatGPT
I wrote for the first time in January about how to make the most of ChatGPT, the most impactful tool of 2023.
The links in that post that readers most often clicked:
The Art of ChatGPT Prompting: A Guide to Crafting Clear and Effective Prompts = A useful free ebook for beginners.
Awesome ChatGPT Prompts Adapt prompts from this collection for your own conversations with ChatGPT.
3. Meet Claude, a helpful new AI bot
Claude, a popular new alternative to ChatGPT, amazed me with its capacity to analyze a 75,000-word document in seconds. It’s a powerful AI alternative to ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing.
Sponsored Message
Host a Virtual Holiday Party, Stress-Free!
Does your remote team need a fun activity for the holidays? With just a few clicks, you can throw an interactive party with activities like trivia, doodle art, and more.The Holiday Jam is FREE for Wonder Tools readers. Set up your Holiday Jam now
🚀 Tools to watch in 2024 👀
A sneak peek at emerging services I’ll write about next year… 🎩
Capacities is a flexible, well-designed new notes app I’m exploring and liking lately. Its tagline: “a studio for your mind.” It’s helpful for organizing digital notes into collections. It’s more advanced and powerful than Evernote, whose future is uncertain, more flexible than Roam, and a creative alternative to Notion (which recently added a neat AI chat feature). I’ll write more on this topic in the months ahead.
Figjam’s new AI makes it one of the slickest digital whiteboards for brainstorming or mapping out projects visually. AI has been a big boost both for Figjam and also for useful alternatives like Lucid, Mural and Miro. Note: Google is killing its free Jamboard tool, so it’s time for a fresh look at whiteboarding tools.
MyMind gives you a gorgeous, private visual space where you can save anything you encounter online. The articles, images, shopping items or whatever else you save are easy to find later — no need to file or tag anything. It’s not for sharing — just private reference.
Hypernatural is a promising new AI service I like for converting any audio into video, or chopping long videos into short social vids. I’ll be exploring lots of other improving AI video tools in 2024, including Veed, Runway, Captions, and Kapwing, which is launching new AI features this week.
mmhmm helps you present more creatively by changing the way you appear in online meetings. I’m looking forward to doing more of my presentations with the new version, slated for early 2024.
Butter is a terrific new online video service for hosting online workshops, trainings, classes or lively meetings. I’ll write more about it in 2024 — and host a live demo so you can see what it’s like. I love how its designed specifically for teaching, learning and collaborating. 2-min video trailer.
Wonder Tools LIVE 👨🏻💻
📆 Join me Tuesday, Dec 19 at 1pm ET for a live demo of Legitimate, a new suite of AI tools specifically developed for journalists. See the AI in action in a live session I’ll host with Caoimhe Donnelly, co-founder and CEO. RSVP for free
Sponsored Message
Practically everything we do at work is a collaboration with other people. Yet we’ve never been taught the skills of effective collaboration. At Flow, we help your colleagues embrace opportunities to improve your ‘ways of working.’
Inspiration twice a month on what helps teams to work smarter and be at their most resourceful, imaginative and brilliant best.
Promote your newsletter, podcast, site, or service with a sponsored message to reach 33,000 Wonder Tools readers in 186 countries.
➡️ Submit your text ad in a form that takes 60 seconds to fill out.
Your sponsorship directly supports this independent newsletter, rather than going to an ad giant or social platform.
Wonder Tools is editorially independent. Everything I write about is something I use. No one has paid me to use or recommend any service. I’m testing affiliate links as a way to support the newsletter and cover costs — in some cases, as with Fathom & Butter, these links provide early access, an extra discount, or another benefit to readers.
Leave a comment 👇
The most popular recent Wonder Tools posts 👇
Share this post 👇
🌤️ Wonder Tools is back to a morning send time today! What did you think of this issue? Comment or reply to reach my inbox. I appreciate any & all input you share. 📨
With so many cool and innovative tools this year, getting to try them all feels like a huge task. Already wishing there was an AI for that 🤣
Thank you very much for the fantastic list btw
High quality post as ever that will no doubt help me reduce my task time again, thank you so much.