8 truly useful AI tools that make your life and work easier

Artificial intelligence is the holy grail of the information age and the hot topic du jour. The hype was triggered by the revolutionary chatbot ChatGPT, which has turned our concept of non-human intelligence on its head.

With a few key words, the AI creates seemingly authentic essays that stand up to critical scrutiny, produces code in various programming languages, and gives brilliant answers in dialog-based exchanges.

ChatGPT is already writing adverts for Ryan Reynolds, and even the almighty Google could be put under pressure by the intelligent software, as suspected by Der Spiegel. However, with Gemini, the search engine king has long since launched its own high-performance AI.

But even beyond top dogs like ChatGPT or Gemini, there are now many useful and functional AI applications that use intelligent algorithms to do a lot of work for us or make our free time more enjoyable. We present eight really powerful AI tools that help us in our everyday lives — including ChatGPT, of course.

Further reading: 9 free AI tools that run locally on your PC

Brain.fm: AI-generated music

Brain.fm offers customized music playlists created by an AI. The content and selection are based on modern neuroscientific findings and are designed to provide listeners with a favorable acoustic environment at work, in their free time, or when falling asleep. More focus, improved concentration, or easier switching off when meditating are promised.

Such audio assistance is achieved with music and sounds that are tuned to the human brainwave pattern. The intelligent part of the offer also aims to personalize the content. As you use the website, you will receive content that is increasingly customized to your mood. Brain.fm’s “Brainwave” music is also available as an app for both Android and iOS.

Genei: Intelligent summaries

Genei is based on the English word for “djinns,” the magical creatures from Far Eastern fables. The AI tool can deal with stories and narratives, but also with scientific texts or reports — and summarize them to a fraction of their original number of characters.

You don’t have time to read a 4-page newspaper article? Genei compresses the content into a few clear bullet points. A colleague writes pages of emails? Genei saves you having to trawl through redundant paragraphs and gets to the heart of the matter. Anyone who works professionally with texts can save an incredible amount of time with this tool. The AI also reduces leisure reading in the blink of an eye, without important content falling through the cracks.

Genei can currently only work with English texts. The ingenious service is free for 14 days. After this trial period, you will have to pay around $10 per month. In return, the tool can also interpret graphics and analyze files up to 5GB in size. Students receive a 40 percent discount.

Beautiful.ai: Presentations that seem effortless

Beautiful.ai can create individual, modern, and quite appealing presentations without you having to spend hours on design, structure, or graphics. You can concentrate on your own message or the content of a business presentation and leave the visuals to the software. This not only saves a huge amount of time, but the results are also visually impressive.

With the service, you no longer have to sit up late at night working on individual slides and adjusting font sizes or line spacing; the AI does it all in real time and depending on the graphics selected and the text fed in.

There are huge libraries of templates and design elements available, and you can also upload your own files from Photoshop or Sketch. There is even an add-in for PowerPoint. Beautful.ai can be tested free of charge for a fortnight, after which various subscription models are available for individuals or companies. If you only need the service for a single project, you can also book ad hoc.

ChatGPT: The AI that started it all

As an AI pioneer, ChatGPT should of course not be missing from our list. The smart bot from OpenAI was instrumental in getting the AI ball rolling and is now available in version 4. The AI can be used by anyone free of charge.

The tool helps us in our private and professional lives, can develop and formulate ideas, shorten or lengthen texts, create diet plans, or show a couch potato the way to successfully conquer a marathon. It can also be used to create or reply to (professional) emails in no time at all based on a few key points.

The bot is now even capable of sarcasm and can poke fun at users if you set your mind to it. The “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” draws on a huge wealth of data from human communication and delivers deceptively realistic results. It can also produce captivatingly beautiful AI-generated images in just a few seconds (for free users with daily limits).

Further reading: ChatGPT vs. Bing vs. Bard: Which AI is best?

LanguageTool: AI proofreading with free offer

LanguageTool is a free and powerful proofreading bot that mercilessly detects grammatical and spelling errors, even in longer texts. Texts can be typed directly into the browser screen or copied and pasted at lightning speed. The analysis is completed in just a few seconds. Color coding highlights individual error types, and even style problems are flagged — for example, if several sentences start with the same word.

If you want to write an important email late at night that should not contain any errors or if you have become text-blind after working with a document for a long time, then the LanguageTool is your savior. We use it to check text and make improvements in no time at all.

A free version is available; however, while it’s also happy to highlight text passages for style reasons, the explanations then wait behind a paywall. The LanguageTool is available as an extension for many browsers, various Office programs, and also as an app ( iOS only so far).

Jasper.ai: Creative texts in 30 languages

Texting can be hard — but it doesn’t have to be. At least if you use the help of the AI-supported Jasper. The tool creates texts with an SEO-friendly yet appealing structure in no time at all. From essays and LinkedIn posts to blog posts, the AI demonstrates a sure hand with creative writing.

Jasper writes exciting product descriptions, creative stories, summaries of other people’s texts to save time, and can even spice up a CV.

If you want to sell something on eBay, Jasper can create a reader-friendly description, and texts or headlines from the AI tool will satisfy any search engine on your own homepage. Jasper supports a total of 30 languages, including German. We can also make entries in one language and have texts output in another.

The quality, but also the truthfulness of such texts depends heavily on user input. For example, if you have a text created but do not provide all the necessary information, Jasper will fill in any gaps in the data with invented values. A thorough text check should therefore always be carried out afterwards.

Murf: Next-level text-to-speech generator

Murf is an intelligent text-to-speech service that will quickly make you prick up your ears. The speech generator goes far beyond the usual functions of classic tools: You can flexibly adjust the pitch, emphasis, punctuation, and other acoustic elements of the voice output.

The smoothly balanced voices with a rich timbre and individual tone color are really impressive. You can emphasize individual words as you wish, videos or images can be accompanied by background music, and the playback speed is also up to the user.

A great feature is that you can also use a voice changer to record our own texts, which are then repeated by one of Murf’s emotional voices. In addition to English, 23 other languages are available, and you can use more than 120 different voices in total.

Fireflies: Never write notes in business meetings again

Fireflies is based on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and has the potential to revolutionize telephone calls and business meetings — and not just for note-takers. The tool can meticulously transcribe (convert into text) meetings, telephone conversations, or voices from audio files.

In conferences, use it to record video or audio files, which are then converted into text within minutes and can be further processed extensively. This eliminates the need for notes, and participants or employees can theoretically use Fireflies to track down selected content or topics from past meetings years later using a keyword search.

Anyone who has ever tried to find a specific point in an hour-long audio recording will not need much explanation about the potential of Fireflies: Users save a lot of time and spare their nerves. They can also create soundbites, highlight important moments, or attach their own notes on what is being discussed at the appropriate point.

Using AI, we can even analyze the mood of conversations, filter out speaking times, or identify monologues. Firefly is therefore also ideal for coaching new or inexperienced colleagues. A free version of the tool is available, but comes with limitations.