True productivity isn’t about grinding harder – it’s about mastering the art of working smarter and thriving amidst the hustle to attain more.
To be more productive, one must frequently use tools that simplify tasks, expedite operations, and maximize efficacy. Therefore, professionals, teams, and entrepreneurs are now switching to artificial intelligence to keep up with this growing world.
So, first off, what is an AI productivity tool?
- A Brief Intro to AI Productivity Tools
An AI productivity tool is a software application that uses artificial intelligence (AI) with machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to help you finish tasks double quick.
You can use AI productivity tools to automate daily tasks, schedule meetings, take notes and summarize meetings, manage tasks, generate images, audio, and videos, write content and exalt its quality, manage email, make presentations, And Whatnot!
By integrating several tasks and data sources, AI-infused tools make sure that your workflows are efficient and smooth. On top of that, they trim the time needed for tedious chores and accelerate data processing.
Let’s check out some of its stupefying statistics.
- Important Statistics of AI Tools Usage
According to one study, customer service agents answered 13.8% more inquiries per hour, business pros wrote 59% more business documents per hour, and programmers coded 126% more projects per week. It concludes that workers’ productivity on everyday chores climbed to 66% by adopting AI tools.
In addition, 92% of Fortune 500 companies already use OpenAI products for their business. Plus, a 2023 survey found that 37% of the U.S. professionals working in advertising or marketing had used generative AI at work. Also, McKinsey predicts that generative AI could enable labor productivity growth of up to 0.6% per year through 2040.
It’s obvious from the above statistics that businesses must start using and benefitting from workflow optimization software. Else, they might be left behind.
- 15 AI Productivity Tools to Boost Workflow
There are droves of AI productivity tools out there for your specific needs to better your workflow. But picking the right one seems pretty daunting, right? So, I’ve sorted out some of the best ones here.
Below are the 15 top AI-driven productivity apps that will help you do more work in less time. I’ll introduce you to them, one by one.
- ChatGPT – Versatile content creation
ChatGPT by OpenAI is one of the most all-the-go conversational AI tools that have grabbed our eyes since its launch. Built on the GPT-4 architecture, it uses NLP to grasp user queries and give human-like responses in the blink of an eye. Since it gives instant replies, it is ideal for customer service. Further, it provides detailed explanations and helps in learning. Hence, it is a fantastic tool for students and professionals.
With GPT-4o, 4o-mini, and the o1 reasoning model, this bot is friendly to use and utterly versatile. Here’s what you can do with ChatGPT. You can generate ideas, poems, essays, code, emails, craft to-do lists, translate languages, summarize content, and so forth.
Having said that, it’s important to bear in mind that the data ChatGPT delivers is sometimes inexact. This is why you need to perform proper fact-checks to get the full picture.
- Asana – Project & task management
Asana is a complete AI-powered project and task management tool. It has features that help teams organize tasks, evaluate progress, and collaborate effectively. With Asana’s centralized communication capability, you don’t need to send emails incessantly. Besides, you can prevent essential data from being lost in the shuffle.
The tool works exactly as a helper, creating intricate workflows and automating daily tasks. It brings fresh ideas to help you along the way and easily adjusts to your fluctuating goals. And, it visually represents task dependencies and project timelines. Plus, it identifies workflow obstacles and project risks, so teams can fix issues before they occur. And also answers all of your project-related questions.
Although this tool focuses on task management, it lacks a time-tracking option, which is expected in most project management tools.
- Grammarly – Better grammar checks
Grammarly is a popular writing assistant that uses AI for flawless grammar and refined writing quality. As you type, it’ll point out your spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, and grammar issues. It helps you strike the right tone, improve clarity and overall readability, set writing goals, and suggest alternatives to simplify complex or lengthy phrases.
GrammarlyGO is Grammarly’s just-unveiled extension that has generative AI capabilities. You can even detect plagiarism with its plagiarism detector. Also, you can integrate it across web apps and text editors, such as Gmail and Google Docs. Whether, you’re writing for work, college, or just texting online, it makes sure whatever you write sounds smooth!
Despite that, it doesn’t let you edit offline and may lower your readability score. Besides, its unpaid version offers less functionality versus the paid one.
- Socratic – Helper in education
Socratic is a marvelous app for educational purposes. It assists students at school and university levels learn and do their homework with ease. All students have to do is pose a question to Socratic. And it will show plenty of online learning materials related to that query. Hence, even teachers find it a perfect companion for students.
It’s like a pocket-friendly tutor that helps in science, maths, social studies, literature, and other subjects. It uses AI text and speech recognition to instruct learners and explain hard topics visually. Also, students can take photos of their tricky assignments, and use Socratic’s AI power to understand and get clear answers. What I love most about Socratic is its free plan. In addition, it has useful quiz features to boost knowledge.
Its only con is that students who seek a cheerful way to learn might not find Socratic fascinating.
- QuillBot – Paraphraser of writing
QuillBot is a pretty cool writing assistant that gives a neat twist to your text by rewriting it. It’s a brill tool for editors, writers, students, and researchers. Writers who struggle to think of the perfect word in their blog, article, or any other text, find QuillBot fruitful.
QuillBot brings worthy AI traits to the table. It spins your sentences, provides multiple outputs that you can use just as they are, and shows copious synonyms for each word and phrase, too. You can change them as you wish. Besides that, it inspects your grammar, sums up long content, shrinks plagiarism, and scans your content’s originality with its AI detector. Moreover, it translates text into myriad languages and generates citations.
On the flip side, some sentences might come off as broken or might not make sense. Though it’s not ideal, QuillBot helps rocket productivity for many users.
- GitHub Pilot – AI pair programmer
GitHub Pilot is a go-to tool for developers and firms who wish to code faster, collaborate well, and build great software. It is an AI pair programmer that lets you write code by predicting what you want next. Whether you work on a simple function or a complex algorithm, it offers code choices that fit your goals.
Copilot reviews your code and gives feedback accordingly. It saves time by erasing manual coding, AI debugging, and hunting for answers online. Further, it neatly interacts with major code editors, like VS Code, so you can focus on tasks without swapping tools. Beyond that, Copilot learns from your coding habits, so as it adjusts to your style and project needs, its ideas get better over time.
No doubt, Copilot is definitely worth it! Still, at times the suggestions you get are totally unrelated. So, you can’t always rely on it. To help Copilot fully grasp your needs, you should give it a little more context.
- Beautiful.ai – Presentation building
Beautiful.ai is an AI software that comes to your rescue if you’re not good at making jaw-dropping presentations. It superbly lifts up presentations for businesses and individuals. Using AI and NLP, it cracks what kind of presentation you want. And makes sure your slides are visually stunning and leave a lasting impression on the viewers.
With tons of modern templates, Beautiful.ai makes creating a slide deck kid’s stuff. It gives layout choices, design ideas, and content suggestions to enrich presentations. Pick the right style and colors, grab free images from the library, and start editing your presentation. You can visualize your data using pre-built diagrams, charts, and graphs. Plus, the app integrates with Slack, Dropbox, and MS PowerPoint.
But, there’s a catch – Beautiful.ai has finite font and customization options and shows issues while exporting.
- Otter.ai – Transcriptions of meeting
Otter.ai is a note-taking app that turns speech into written text using AI. It acts like a quick-witted partner that transcribes recorded audio/video files and live meetings. Thus, it’s useful for lectures, meetings, presentations, and interviews.
The most intriguing fact about Otter.ai is that it can condense a 1-hour meeting into just 30 seconds! Besides, it works fine with Google Calendar and autojoins Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Hence, you can document every detail and there’s no chance of missing any. Plus, it omits filler words and distinguishes among speakers. Furthermore, users can playback the audio clip to see if it syncs with its corresponding text. Then, tweak transcripts manually.
Just keep in mind that Otter.ai isn’t always accurate when it comes to technical terms, so you need to recheck its precision. Also, it only supports the English language.
- Synthesia – Script to AI video converter
Synthesia stands out among the rest because it can turn scripts into stunning studio-quality videos and voice-overs like the wind. These clips work excellently for customer support, education, training, product tutorials, and marketing, helping you escalate your team’s output.
With Synthesia STUDIO, get access to an amazing library with realistic voice-overs in 130+ languages and 160+ ethnically distinct AI avatars. Even, you can clone your voice or make your own digital twin. Additionally, you get copious free video templates, soundtracks, images, and more, to speed up your video production. The best thing about Synthesia is that you can edit videos, update the library, and embed videos into your tech via integrations, all with ease.
However, the AI voice sometimes can sound a bit robotic on hearing closely and might not have a word for word pronunciation.
- DALL-E 3 – Text to AI image generator
DALL-E 3 is hands-down the most sophisticated, yet simple to use AI model you’ll find to produce highly detailed and lifelike images from simple textual descriptions. Just enter a brief explanation of what you’re thinking. Then, the DALL-E 3 algorithm will reply with variations of artistic pictures to illustrate that single prompt. After generating an image, refine it as per your needs or modify your prompt to create a new one.
This upgrade gets your text prompts better and produces vivid and detailed images that are often entertaining. Therefore, it’s not just for artists and designers, but for developers, too. Because they can use it to quickly create custom images or visuals for marketing materials, documentation, and UI/UX projects.
The only downside is that it’s still limited in its data and has issues generating photos of some objects. Yet, for, me, DALL-E 3 is a marvel!
- Descript – AI audio & video editor
Descript is highly suited for you if you wrestle to create and edit your weekly audios, podcasts, and videos. It’s the easiest and fastest editing tool and does well in both fun projects and professional work. Using AI, it transcribes spoken words into text, generates video captions, and lets you create voices similar to humans.
What’s unique about Descript is that to trim the audio or video file, you only have to edit the script. Then, Descript will automatically make those edits in the files. Its AI green screen video editing lets you remove backgrounds with a single click. Moreover, it eliminates pauses and repeats and adds effects to videos. Hence, it saves you hours of editing work. That’s why many video producers, podcasters, and journalists use it and love it.
But it needs refinement in transcribing accuracy, also, novice users find it cumbersome to use.
- Zapier – Cross-app tasks automation
Zapier is a favorite artificial intelligence tool businesses use for automating umpteen of tasks. It supports pretty much every app you use and works across 7000+ apps. This software runs speedily and lets you create automated sequences, called Zaps. You can use it to automate data analysis, email drafting, scheduling, branding, managing projects, and so on.
It integrates the data between web apps. With Zapier, you can connect Slack, Gmail, and a wide range of other web apps to customize and improve workflows. Not just that, Zapier is extremely easy to use and set up. Thus, even those with no technical know-how can use it deftly. Furthermore, it gives suggestions on how to join services in useful ways.
Yet, Zapier may feel overwhelming and sometimes tiring to learn. Besides, it may stop without you knowing, unless you log in daily to check.
- Perplexity AI – Quick, reliable research
Perplexity is a great AI chatbot that’s won our focus because of its well-written responses and brilliant ability to cite sources. You will get an answer for every search you do, along with a link to the original source. Also, it can stick to a topic, even when you ask follow-up queries. Besides, it lets you restrict your results to just specific areas of the net, like academic papers, Reddit, etc. To help in your search process, you can even upload your text, images, or PDFs.
It’s quite useful for doing sound research on a range of subjects and locating information for which you don’t know the reference. For these reasons, researchers, educators, students, and marketers prefer it most. Further, it is hallucination-free and quick at replying to inquiries in a human tone.
Perplexity, however, might deliver outdated info and not always link the correct response to your query.
- Superhuman – Fast email management
Superhuman is an email app that has been lauded for its speedier searching, loading, and accessing of mobile emails. Everything is really snappy. This is perfect when you’re in a rush or want emails to open faster.
Here are a few best things about Superhuman. It enables you to manage the inbox better by sorting emails into the right places. It has snippets for fast replies and keyboard shortcuts for quick actions. With Ask AI, it allows you to ask for information your emails have got inside. It snoozes emails, autocorrects, and shortens lengthy emails. Moreover, you can sync it with your calendar and schedule emails to send later. It literally saves you hours of working on emails.
But remember, this tool isn’t a Gmail replacement for people who do emails for only casual use, and it lacks a domain. Apart from that, many people see its price as a bit expensive.
- Reclaim AI – Smart scheduling calendar
Reclaim AI is an intelligent scheduling app teams and individuals use to increase efficiency, collaborate better, and improve work-life balance. It automatically syncs with your calendar and decides the ideal time for tasks, habits, meetings, and breaks. More than that, it defends the time you need to finish important tasks by adjusting your schedule. As a result, this saves time, prevents back-and-forth emails, keeps everyone on track, and brings your stress levels down.
It’s like having a pro who works 24/7 and makes sure you have time for what matters most. Additionally, the app integrates with popular tools like Google Tasks. It also delivers analytics so you can manage time successfully.
That said, Reclaim AI is web-based only, with neither desktop nor mobile versions, and has minimal project management features. Plus, it can be overwhelming to set up.
Wrapping Up
The AI-driven automation tools and apps we’ve talked about boost productivity by minimizing a pile of repetitive tasks and saving plenty of time. They are helpful for different types of work. Having such tools by your side helps you do things you enjoy and come up with ingenious ways to achieve more. So, let’s not hesitate to give them a try – they might make your daily chores a no-sweat job!