12 new ways to use AI 🤖

AI to try, plus an invitation and new goodies for paid subscribers 🎁

This week I’m sharing 12 new ways to use AI to save time and reduce the drudgery of repetitive work.

First, an announcement.

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• Founding subscriber benefits The first batch of subscribers will get access to special launch perks & invites this month, including a new list of my 100 top sites for 2023 featuring writing tools, the best of AI & more.

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🤖 12 AI tools that will save you time

1. Sum up your long Slack threads. [theGist] 

   Staying current on dozens of Slack channels can be hard. I like how theGist sums up multiple threads. Start by adding it to your high-priority channels. You can then view summaries privately, or share them with your team. Gmail summaries are coming soon.

2. Clean up your audio recordings. [Adobe Noise Removal]

   Upload an audio recording with background noise and magically, you’ll get back a clean version. To hear the enhancement in action, listen to this post’s audio voiceover. No cost, no waiting, no complexity.

3. Add magic to your spreadsheets… [Grid]

   Grid’s formula assistant lets you type what you’re looking for into a spreadsheet cell in your own words. It then spits out the formula you need. This 2.5-minute video shows how it works.

   • You can also use Grid without AI. It’s a delightful alternative to Google Sheets and Excel that lets you easily make sleek interactive sheets incorporating data, charts and text.

4. …Or let an AI wizard teach you spreadsheet lingo [Asa]

   Asa is a new add-on for Google Sheets that stands for "Ask Sheets Anything." Rather than searching for advanced commands, pose a natural-language question about how to do something and ASA will answer. Unlike Grid, Asa works within Google Sheets.

5. Get an article summarized quickly. [AskRoger.ai]

   Send a link via Messenger, Slack, Twitter, Whatsapp or email and you'll get back a useful short summary. Free for 10 experiments, then $2 to $5 for the next 75k article words summarized.    

6. Outline a new course. [Pathwright Project Socrates]

   Type in a few keywords to get a draft of a course outline you can revise or build upon. ChatGPT can also create course outline drafts, but Pathwright provides a course shell where you can organize and deliver courses. Available soon.

   • For micro-courses — think 5 to 30 minutes — 7Taps has a new automated course creator too. It’s even running an AI course-creation contest.

   • If you’re camera shy, you can select one of 7Taps’s human-looking avatars to read your course script.

7. Adjust your mic placement. [Adobe Mic Check]

   Find out if you’re too close to your mic or otherwise need adjustments. Your Zoom call partners and podcast listeners will thank you.

8. See an automated summary of your Zoom call [Grain]

   Poring over meeting minutes is painful. Grain’s AI gives you an instant summary of any recording with timecode annotations. Share the summary or use it to jump to key moments in the video or transcript.

   • Otter.ai has an AI meeting assistant that can record your meeting and save snapshots of slides shown, but I found Grain’s summaries to be more useful.

9. Generate a recipe for your leftovers. [Recipes by AI]

   Tell the AI how many overripe avocados, bananas and pineapples you’ve got, along with other ingredients, and it’ll spin out a recipe for you. But as the NYTimes found out on Thanksgiving, AI doesn’t always yield yumminess.

10. Train your own AI image generator [Facet.ai]

    Upload between 4 and 200 of your own images to train an AI model and use it to create new visuals related stylistically to the ones you’ve uploaded. Facet’s AI’s advanced image editing offers a new alternative to Photoshop.

    

11. Listen to a live discussion in your native language. [Forum by Waverly Labs]

    Forum uses AI to automate live simultaneous translations in multiple languages. Listeners open the app to connect to an event and choose their preferred language. I was impressed at how well it worked for a live meeting.

    • An off-Broadway theater is testing Forum as a way for audiences to hear the actors' lines in their native language.  

    • Churches are testing it as a way for congregants to hear sermons in their chosen language.

12. Create a pre-filled map. [MapsGPT] 

    Type in whatever you’re looking for and get an instant map back. It’s powered by Proxi, a useful map-creation tool I wrote about.

    • Search for phrases like sports teams with losing seasons in Texas, grassy dog parks in NYC or places with ghost encounters in Austin.

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