There are already literally thousands of AI tools customized to endless use cases. Chat GPT barely scratches the surface. I’ve been doing a massive deep dive, testing out hundreds of AI tools, and I want to highlight the most powerful, the craziest, and the most useful.
Let’s start with a few that are just mind-blowing. Some are in the early stages, but they give you a glimpse of what’s to come. So, I’ll cover those quickly just for fun, then I’ll dive into the really useful ones.
Nvidia have a few amazing AI products. One that’s really fun to mess around with is Canvas. You just paint basic shapes and lines and choose from their palette of materials and create photorealistic landscapes. There are all sorts of presets to change the look of the image, and you can create all the way up to 360-degree panoramas.
They also offer Nvidia Broadcast, which is great for audio and video. It can remove background noise and echoes, replace backgrounds, auto-frame, and remove noise. But it also has this feature I haven’t seen anywhere else. For eye contact, you can be looking off-camera at a script or teleprompter, and it will edit the eyes as if you were looking directly at the camera the entire time.
They also have Omniverse, which is a suite of tools for 3D artists with real-time collaboration. Nvidia is just killing it.
Versy is really crazy to me. It’s the first text-to-space AI. You start with the text prompt, and it will generate an entire customizable virtual experience. You can connect different rooms and other virtual spaces together, add objects, view them from every angle. Just technology like this that really gets me thinking about some of the craziness that could be coming with the metaverse much sooner than I thought.
You might have seen many text-to-image generators, which have gotten incredible. I’ll talk about those later, but let’s look at text-to-video generators. The really impressive ones are from Meta and Google. But they’re not available to the public yet. Google’s Imagine looks absolutely insane with what it’s capable of, as far as options you can mess around with. Right now, the best option I’ve seen is KAIBER. You just type a prompt, or you can upload an image and add a prompt, then it will make these cool videos.
There’s room for improvement, but you can generate some really cool stuff. You can even upload a song and define your style to create a music video. Linkin Park used it to create a music video that has 50+ million views.
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Another one is LeiaPix, which can make photos into animations. It adds depth and makes them look 3D. Then you can adjust the angle, speed, and animation style. It looks awesome, and it’s free to use. But really, Google seems like they’re way ahead of the curve here.
Now we’ll dive into the more practical. Here’s one that really demonstrates how much AI is already forcing society to change. It’s called Caktus, and it can help with basically all of your schoolwork. The AI writer can deliver essays in minutes. It can improve content you’ve already written, expand sentences, fix grammar, format for AP style, and create citations.
There’s a similarly powerful section dedicated to STEM fields, another for coding. It does have some more wholesome uses, like for studying. But for those that are using this to write their essays, there are already AI detectors out there, but they’re really easy to work around. Now it doesn’t matter if you think this is right or wrong. Kids are already doing this, and there’s no way the AI detectors are going to keep up. School is going to have to adapt to the times, not the other way around.
I actually want to follow that up with a tool called Wisdolia. I may not be a big fan of school, but I’m a massive fan of learning, and Wisdolia has been extremely helpful. It creates flashcards on any website. Instead of just passively consuming content online, you can click generate flashcards and receive question and answer flashcards to help you remember what you learned in an article.
You can then save those in Anki and use their spaced repetition system to counter the forgetting curve and retain the information long term. I highly recommend this one, and it’s a free extension.
Alright, let’s do a couple of creepy ones really quick.
Rewind is straight out of a Black Mirror episode. “Our vision is to give humans perfect memory.” This is just the first step. Thanks for trying, Rewind. They call it the search engine for your life. It will remember everything you’ve seen, said, or heard. It says they use mind-boggling compression, so it doesn’t take up that much space on your computer.
Pimeyes uses facial recognition to find every photo of you on the internet. You do have to pay to get the results, and it doesn’t search social media sites, but you can find out if your photos are being used anywhere else.
Deep Nostalgia is really just creepy to me, but it could have some cool use cases. It adds animation to faces in photos, and the result is unsettling. It’s not that far in the future where you’ll be able to upload a photo and type whatever prompt you want, and it will edit that into a video with full three-dimensionality and look realistic. Some of the deep fake technology is already well on its way.
D-ID lets you choose an avatar to visualize and speak directly to Chat GPT. “Inspire me in a sentence before my big meeting.” “You have the power within you to overcome any obstacle and achieve greatness.”
Alright, enough of those. There are some really cool video editing tools that have come out.
RunwayML has the biggest suite of tools with some really unique features. With text-to-color grade, you can just type whatever you want your scene to look like, and it will change the color balance for you. And their super slow-mo feature is great. You can turn any video, regardless of the frame rate it was shot at, into smooth slow motion. It will use AI to generate the missing frames.
Inpainting lets you easily remove objects from videos. They have a lot of image tools too, like expanding images, altering with text prompts, colorizing black and white images, converting low-resolution photos to high resolution. Just a bunch of stuff.
This one I’m really excited about. It’s called Their Gen 1, and it’s in the testing phase, but it is really crazy. You can alter videos with a prompt or by combining it with styles from an image you upload. So, you can say “make this video claymation” or upload an image and say “add this style to that video”.
You can actually use all of their tools for free to test them out and see if it’s for you, but you’ll only be able to export them at 720p instead of 1080 or 4K unless you sign up for $12 a month, which is pretty reasonable.
With Luma Labs, you can create photorealistic 3D scenes and assets in seconds. It lets you capture a room or environment and upload it then it will turn that into a 3D world you can navigate around. If you’ve ever looked into how this type of thing was done in the past, this is a massive step forward. It also has the ability to upload photoreal game assets from your phone into any game engine.
You may have seen some new productivity tools like Superhuman or Merlin that integrate ChatGPT across different websites and into your email.
There are two new tools that will probably eliminate the need for those completely. One that was announced just a few days ago is Microsoft 365 Copilot. This brings AI across Microsoft’s entire suite of software.
In Word, it can generate your first draft, shorten, rewrite, or get feedback. In PowerPoint, it can create beautiful presentations from a single prompt. In Excel, it can analyse trends and create visualizations, clear your inbox in Outlook, automate repetitive tasks. All of this and much more using just natural language.
Along these same lines is Google’s new AI features. They’re not out as of now, but they will be soon. There will be AI within Gmail and the Google Workspace. It will draft, summarize, brainstorm, proofread, generate formulas for Sheets, create images for presentations. All those same types of features but for Google.
A lot of this stuff is great for productivity, but Sam Altman, C.E.O. of OpenAI, actually summarized some of the weirdness to this in a tweet. “There’s something very strange about people writing bullet points, having Chat GPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and the sender using Chat GPT to condense it into the key bullet points.” And I agree, it is weird. But as these tools become commonplace, I’m sure we’ll start using them in different ways and adapt.
Notion implemented AI into its platform, and this is a great move. I won’t go into it too much because it’s pretty straightforward. The same writing, summarizing, and brainstorming features are available natively within the app, which, if you’ve never used it, is one of the leading note-taking apps. So, it’s great to have the feature right there when you need it. I assume in another year, it’s going to be just commonplace to have this feature within tons of apps and probably natively as part of your phone’s keyboard to use within.
Now I want to do a kind of rapid fire through a few that are really cool but don’t need a long explanation.
Wist Labs makes your memory immersive. It can convert your videos into 3D to be used in augmented or virtual reality.
AutoDraw lets you draw faster. You just start drawing, and it will guess what it is that you’re trying to draw, and you can choose from all the options. It’s a really handy way to get some quick graphics that look nice.
With Reimagined Home, you can test out different setups for interior or exterior design. See what a new couch would look like or maybe some new hardwood floors.
DoNotPay is the first robot lawyer. It has a huge list of legal situations it can help with.
Soundraw is the coolest music generator I’ve seen. You can make music for YouTube videos, podcasts, or ads. Whatever you need music for, you can choose from all different styles, then customize the energy level throughout the song. You can sync it up with aspects of your video that need different moods. You can even choose which instruments you want in different sections, where you want fills or melody. You can choose mood, theme, genre, length, tempo, instrumentation. It’s really custom.
Now, this one is $16.99 per month if you want to use the music commercially, which most people do.
The best free option I’ve seen is Mubert. It’s not as customizable, but you can still get some good stuff, and you just have to add attribution to be able to use it.
Eleven Labs is the best voice clone I tried that resulted in the most realistic sounding voice. You can upload recordings of your own voice, then feed it a script, and it will speak in your voice with the same pauses and intonation. It’ll change inflection and emotion based on the content. It’s pretty crazy how good it is at this.
Now there are a lot of options for text-to-image generation, and they are getting insane now. The top three are Mid-Journey, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-e, but Mid-Journey is probably my favourite out of all the image generators, although it is the one that takes the most steps to get started since it’s all operated within Discord, and you use commands in the chat to prompt it.
If you’ve never used Discord, it’ll take a little bit to get started the first time you try it out. You can get cool stuff, but when you really deep dive into the prompt, you can get incredible images that are just how you envision them in any style you want, from photography to painting to graphic design. Just whatever you ask it. I won’t dive into the prompt engineering side because it’s pretty in-depth and there is a learning curve, but definitely watch some tutorial videos on it. It’s a ton of fun.
There’s an entire category of AI art now, and I will throw in the caveat that this is definitely a grey area as far as copyright. These are trained on existing artist styles, and that’s what they’re using to generate a lot of these images.
There is a company called Glaze developing technology to interfere with AI models’ ability to read their data, but like I said before, you can think what you want about this stuff. It’s not going away.
A few in the realm of business, although most have applications outside of business as well. There are some insane website creators where you just have to input a business idea, and from that single prompt, they’ll design a full landing page, email lists with subscriber management tools, come up with a brand name, logo, and copy, all in just a few minutes. It’s a crazy time saver, and there are a few sites that do the same thing.
There’s Mixo and Sitekick that you can jump on and test out for free. These aren’t going to be websites with a ton of functionality, but they’re awesome for testing out ideas. You can just type in a product idea, it will create your full site in minutes, and then you can run some ads, drive traffic to it however you want, then see how many people sign up for the email list. You’ll be able to gauge how much demand there is before you build out the full site and product.
And there’s a lot of options for writing copy, short or long form. The one that tends to come out on top in most people’s minds, especially for long form, is Jasper. It optimizes for SEO without plagiarism, can do copy for Facebook ads, help get ideas, write in 25 languages. It’s all-around one of the best writing tools out there, and you can get your first 10,000 words for free to try it out.
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There’s a lot of other competitors that have similar features but some with different specialties. To name a few, there’s Copy.ai, very similar with a focus on high-converting sales copy.
WriteSonic has a ton of great templates. Moonbeam is geared more towards long-form writing like essays, lesson plans, newsletters. There’s a lot of others, but those are the best that I’ve tried out.
Looka is a great website for getting your branding/logo. Type in your business name, choose a few logos you like, and some colours, then it will generate hundreds of logos you can choose from to customize further.
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There are sites like Poly.ai that have AI voice assistance to answer incoming calls. It says they can resolve fifty percent of customer needs without them ever needing to speak to a person. With Synthesia, you can choose an avatar and custom AI voice to deliver any script you upload. This is great for things like trainings or product how-to videos.
Tome is amazing. It can make full presentations from a single prompt. Just type in your subject and a brief description, then Tome will generate engaging text and tailor-made images, all in a captivating story-like way. Then it’s easily customizable. Of course, it’s not going to be perfect on the first try, but it gives you an insanely good skeleton to work with. You just reword and add information from there.
Last but not least is Future Tools. This was important to add because new tools are coming out on the market at an insane rate. A video like this one will be out of date really quickly. Future Tools is an easily searchable database of all the AI tools that are out, with new ones being added every day.
There are other sites like There’s An AI For That or Futurepedia, but I found Future Tools is the easiest to navigate. You can go here and search by the categories they have listed, or you can search for something specific.
If there’s a tool I mentioned in the article that you think sounds interesting, I’d recommend checking here and seeing if there are other similar tools and comparing them, especially if you’re reading this very far into the future, because there will probably be new and better tools out a week from now. So, you can go here, spend some time searching through the database, explore. I guarantee you can find some tools to help improve your life, whether that’s at your job, a business you run, your personal life with creativity, or any avenue of life.
Here is a comprehensive list:
- Nvidia: Offers various AI products including Canvas, Nvidia Broadcast, and Omniverse.
- Versy: A text-to-space AI that generates customizable virtual experiences.
- Google’s Imagine: A text-to-video generator.
- Kaiber ai: A text-to-video generator that can create cool videos.
- LeiaPix: Turns photos into animations, adding depth and making them look 3D.
- RunwayML: Offers various AI-powered video editing tools.
- Luma Labs: Creates photorealistic 3D scenes and assets.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot: Integrates AI across Microsoft’s suite of software.
- Future Tools: A database of various AI tools available in the market.
- Wist Labs: Converts videos into 3D for use in augmented or virtual reality.
- AutoDraw: Helps you draw faster by guessing what you’re trying to draw.
- Reimagined Home: Tests out different setups for interior or exterior design.
- Do Not Pay: A robot lawyer that assists with legal situations.
- Soundraw: Generates music for videos, podcasts, etc.
- ElevenLabs: Creates realistic voice clones.
- Mid-Journey: Generates images based on prompts within Discord.
- Stable Diffusion: Generates images based on prompts.
- Dall-e: Generates images based on prompts.
- Jasper: An advanced writing tool for various purposes.
- Copy.ai: Focuses on generating high-converting sales copy.
- WriteSonic: Offers a variety of writing templates.
- Moonbeam: Geared towards long-form writing.
- Luca: Helps with branding and logo creation.
- Poly.ai: Provides AI voice assistance for calls.
- Synthesia: Allows for customization of AI-generated videos.
- Tome: Generates presentations from a single prompt.
