How I Use AI for Productivity ✍️

In this week’s Wonder Tools I’m experimenting with an audio post, with summary points below.

Nikita Roy

recently interviewed me for her Newsroom Robots podcast. I’m sharing the conversation to give you a window into the AI tools I find most useful with explanations of how and why I use them.

During the conversation I share my AI experiments and thoughts on:

• How Claude offers a powerful alternative to ChatGPT for long documents (~5:55 in the audio)

• Why I tried Woebot & Personal.ai to stretch my thinking (~3:54)

• My four Fs checklist for testing new AI tools (~20:45)

Interview Excerpt

This audiogram was made with Hypernatural, an impressive new AI tool I’ll write about in a future post.

Tools used in making this audio post

• Squadcast for recording the interview. (I also like Riverside.fm for recording)

  • Shure MV7 microphone

  • Adobe podcast for recording and removing background noise from the opening supplemental audio clip, and Adobe Mic check to gauge microphone positioning

  • Audacity for merging audio clips

  • Descript for light audio editing

• Hypernatural for generating the audiograms

• Claude for identifying potentially interesting moments in the transcript

• Substack for newsletter and audio delivery

10 Takeaways on AI

1. Alternatives to ChatGPT are worth exploring. Personal.ai and Woebot are in a growing category of new AI assistants that can serve as conversational partners. They aim to provide comfort or companionship and to get to know you over time. (~3:54 in the audio)

   Update: Woebot just announced its app will close on November 30, 2023.

2. Claude’s superpower is ingesting giant texts. I find Claude's ability to analyze large uploaded documents (up to 75,000 words) useful. I can have Claude summarize key points from a research paper to help me learn from it more efficiently. (~6:01)
   

   Below is the post I wrote about this:
   

   Meet Claude 🦄 A helpful new AI assistant

3. I made a little French bot... I created a simple FrenchGuru language bot with Poe to explain French grammar and phrases. (~8:02)
   

   Other Poe bots I created you can use for free:
   - 6WordSummary sums up anything in six words
   - MemoryAid gives you a mnemonic device for whatever you want to recall.

   - BotanyBlair gives you interesting info about any plant + a two-line poem.
   - EthicalJourno responds to queries based on the ethical principles of the Society of Professional Journalists.

   
   Here’s the post I wrote about this:
   

   Make your own AI bot 👩‍💻 — Wonder Tools

4. AI can be useful as an experimental email assistant. The AI reviews my past writing to understand my style. When I lack time for a from-scratch response to every cold email, I can provide phrases and have Superhuman AI stitch together a draft, allowing me to spend time editing rather than composing all email from scratch. (~14:52)

   RSVP to join me on November 28 at 3pm ET for a live demo of Shortwave, another email tool incorporating AI creatively.

5. Multimedia AI tools are worth exploring. Tools like Runway ML, Kapwing, and Descript use AI to streamline video editing and creation. (~23:12)

   Why I find Descript so useful:
   

   🎥 The Best New Way to Edit Multimedia — Wonder Tools

6. AI tools should provide clearer guidance to users. Until recently, services like ChatGPT and Claude basically gave you a blank box and invited you to figure out what to do. (~25:20)

7. New AI tools like 4149.ai have creative features that can summarize classes and allow students to 'query' the AI with questions about session content. It's like having an assistant who memorized every word. (~31:40)

8. I use an AI app called Bloks to generate meeting summaries and notes on conference sessions. This allows me to focus on listening and thinking rather than manual note-taking. (~34:12)
   p.s. I also use and recommend Fathom (as a reader/friend you can skip the waitlist) for time-coded meeting summaries.

9. AI can eventually help provide more customized journalism education. I see AI as helpful for creating adaptive learning materials tailored to each student's language, culture, interests, and project work. (~36:16)

10. AI can reduce some of the sting of menial tasks. AI can help with manual tasks in the journalism workflow — like analyzing datasets, scanning notes to find mentions of a topic, and more. (~37:37)

Join Nikita and me to delve deeper into AI…

🔔 Introducing the Generative AI for Media Pros Masterclass
A Wonder Tools + Newsroom Robots collaboration

Find out more and sign up for one of the limited December spots. It’s hands-on, small-cohort with one-on-one guidance.

I’ll co-lead this live cohort-based course alongside Nikita Roy, the journalist, data scientist, media entrepreneur and host of the Newsroom Robots podcast, who interviewed me for this audio post.

Check out recent Wonder Tools posts on AI

🧠 How ChatGPT changed my approach to learning

4 new ways to use Bard AI 🌟

🌟 60-Second AI

… And check out the Newsroom Robots podcast for more from

Nikita Roy

I’d love your feedback on this audio post. Hit reply to reach me or email jeremy at jeremycaplan dot com.