AI moved fast and most people are still using about 10% of what’s available to them. This isn’t a list for developers or early adopters – it’s for anyone who wants to actually get something done, written, planned, or figured out a bit quicker than before.
Contents
🤖 The Big Three
- ChatGPT by OpenAI – The one that started the conversation. Still the most widely used AI assistant in the world, and for good reason. Strong across writing, research, summarising documents, and answering questions that would otherwise take twenty browser tabs to figure out.
- Claude by Anthropic – The one that reads longer documents without losing the thread. Better than most at nuanced writing, careful reasoning, and tasks where tone actually matters. Worth using alongside ChatGPT rather than instead of it.
- Gemini by Google – Google’s answer, and increasingly a good one. Particularly useful if you’re already in the Google ecosystem – it connects with Drive, Docs, and Gmail in ways the others currently don’t.
🔍 Search That Actually Answers
- Perplexity – An AI-powered search engine that gives you a direct answer with cited sources rather than a list of links to click through. Good for research, fact-checking, and anything where you want context fast.
🎙️ Meetings & Audio
- NotebookLM by Google – Feed it documents, PDFs, or notes, and ask it questions about them. Genuinely useful for research and revision. Also generates surprisingly good audio overviews of complex material.
- Otter.ai – Records and transcribes meetings in real time, then produces a summary with key points highlighted. Works across Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet.
🎨 Images & Creative
- Ideogram – A text-to-image generator that handles typography better than most. Useful if you need social graphics, quick mockups, or images that include readable text.
- Adobe Firefly – Adobe’s AI image generator, built directly into Photoshop and Express. Commercially safe to use, which matters if you’re creating anything for public-facing work.
✍️ Writing & Editing
- Grammarly – Spell-check has been around forever, but the AI layer in Grammarly now catches tone issues, structural problems, and unclear phrasing. The free tier covers most people’s needs.
- Hemingway Editor – Paste in any text and it flags complexity, passive voice, and sentences that are doing too much. Free in the browser, no account needed.
💭 Worth Thinking About
- Most of these tools have a free tier that covers everyday use – you don’t need to pay to find out whether any of them work for you. Start with one, use it until it becomes a habit, then add another.
Found something that should be on here? Drop it in the comments — we update this list regularly.