Tapedulema919•This week
The best (actually free to use) AI tools for day-to-day work + productivity
I've spent an ungodly amount of time ~~procrastinating~~ trying tons of new/free AI tools from Reddit and various lists of the best AI tools for different use cases. Frankly, most free AI tools (and even paid ones) are gimmicky ChatGPT wrappers with questionable utility in everyday tasks or overpriced enterprise software that don't use AI as anything more than a marketing buzzword.
My last list of free AI tools got a good response here, and I wanted to make another with the best AI tools that I actually use day-to-day now that I've spent more time with them.
All these tools can be used for free, though most of them have some kind of premium offering if you need more advanced stuff or a ton of queries. To make it easy to sort through, I've also added whether each tool requires signup.
ChatPDF: Free Tool to Use ChatGPT on Your Own Documents/PDFs
(free no signup)
Put simply, ChatPDF lets you upload any PDF and interact with it like ChatGPT. I heard about this one from my nephew who used it to automatically generate flashcards and explain concepts based on class notes and readings. There are a few similar services out there, but I found ChatPDF the easiest to use of those that don't require payment/signup.
If you're a student or someone who needs to read through long PDFs regularly, the possibilities to use this are endless. It's also completely free and doesn't require signup.
Key Features:
Free to upload up to 3 PDFs daily, with up to 120 pages in each PDF
Can be used without signing up at all
Taskade: AI Task Management, Scheduling, and Notetaking Tool with GPT-4 Built-In
(free with signup)
Taskade is an all-in-one notetaking, task management, and scheduling platform with built-in AI workflows and templates. Like Notion, Taskade lets you easily create workspaces, documents, and templates for your workflows. Unlike Notion’s GPT-3 based AI, Taskade has built-in GPT-4 based AI that’s trained to structure your documents, create content, and otherwise help you improve your productivity.
Key Features:
GPT-4 is built in to their free plan and trained to help with document formatting, scheduling, content creation and answering questions through a chat interface. Its AI seems specifically trained to work seamlessly with your documents and workspaces, and understands queries specific to their interface like asking it to turn (text) notes into a mind map.
One of the highest usage limits of the free tools: Taskade’s free plan comes with 1000 monthly requests, which is one of the highest I’ve seen for a tool with built-in GPT-4. Because it’s built into a document editor with database, scheduling and chat capabilities, you can use it for pretty much anything you’d use ChatGPT for but without* paying for ChatGPT Premium.
Free templates to get you started with actually integrating AI into your workflows: there are a huge number of genuinely useful free templates for workflows, task management, mind mapping, etc. For example, you can add a project and have Taskade automatically map out and schedule a breakdown of the tasks that make up that overall deliverable.
Plus AI for Google Slides: AI-generated (and improved) slide decks
(free with signup, addon for Google Slides)
I've tried out a bunch of AI presentation/slide generating tools. To be honest, most of them leave a lot to be desired and aren't genuinely useful unless you're literally paid to generate a presentation vaguely related to some topic. Plus AI is a (free!) Google Slides addon that lets you describe the kind of slide deck you're making, then generate and fine-tune it based on your exact needs.
It's still not at the point where you can literally just tell it one prompt and get the entire finished product, but it saves a bunch of time getting an initial structure together that you can then perfect. Similarly, if you have existing slides made you can tell it (in natural language) how you want it changed. For example, asking it to change up the layout of text on a page, improve the writing style, or even use external data sources.
Key Features:
Integrates seamlessly into Google Slides: if you’re already using Slides, using Plus AI is as simple as installing the plugin. Their tutorials are easy to follow and it doesn’t require learning some new slideshow software or interface like some other options.
Create and* tweak slides using natural language: Plus AI lets you create whole slideshows, adjust text, or change layouts using natural language. It’s all fairly intuitive and the best of the AI slide tools I’ve tried.
FlowGPT: Database of AI prompts and workflows
(free without signup-though it pushes you to signup!)
FlowGPT collects prompts and collections of prompts to do various tasks, from marketing, productivity, and coding to random stuff people find interesting. It uses an upvote system similar to Reddit that makes it easy to find interesting ways to use ChatGPT. It also lets you search for prompts if you have something in mind and want to see what others have done.
It's free and has a lot of cool features like showing you previews of how ChatGPT responds to the prompts. Unfortunately, it's also a bit pushy with getting you to signup, and the design leaves something to be desired, but it's the best of these tools I've found.
Key Features:
Lots of users that share genuinely useful and interesting prompts
Upvote system similar to Reddit’s that allows you to find interesting prompts within the categories you’re interested in
Summarize.Tech: AI summaries of YouTube Videos
(free no signup)
Summarize generates AI summaries of YouTube videos, condensing them into relatively short written notes with timestamps. All the summaries I've seen have been accurate and save significant time.
I find it especially useful when looking at longer tutorials where I want to find if:
​
The tutorial actually tells me what I'm looking for, and
See where in the video I can find that specific part. The one downside I've seen is that it doesn't work for videos that don't have subtitles, but hopefully, someone can build something with Whisper or a similar audio transcription API to solve that.
Claude: ChatGPT Alternative with ~75k Word Limit
(free with signup)
If you've used ChatGPT, you've probably run into the issue of its (relatively low) token limit. Put simply, it can't handle text longer than a few thousand words. It's the same reason why ChatGPT "forgets" instructions you gave it earlier on in a conversation. Claude solves that, with a \~75,000 word limit that lets you input literal novels and do pretty much everything you can do with ChatGPT.
Unfortunately, Claude is currently only free in the US or UK. Claude pitches itself as the "safer" AI, which can make it a pain to use for many use cases, but it's worth trying out and better than ChatGPT for certain tasks. Currently, I'm mainly using it to summarize long documents that ChatGPT literally cannot process as a single prompt.
Key Features:
Much longer word limit than even ChatGPT’s highest token models
Stronger guardrails than ChatGPT: if you're into this, Claude focuses a lot more on "trust and safety" than even ChatGPT does. While an AI telling me what information I can and can't have is more of an annoyance for my use cases, it can be useful if you're building apps like customer support or other use cases where it's a top priority to keep the AI from writing something "surprising."
Phind: AI Search Engine That Combines Google with ChatGPT
(free no signup)
Like a combination of Google and ChatGPT. Like ChatGPT, it can understand complex prompts and give you detailed answers condensing multiple sources. Like Google, it shows you the most up-to-date sources answering your question and has access to everything on the internet in real time (vs. ChatGPT's September 2021 cutoff).
Unlike Google, it avoids spammy links that seem to dominate Google nowadays and actually answers your question.
Key Features:
Accesses the internet to get you real-time information vs. ChatGPT’s 2021 cutoff. While ChatGPT is great for content generation and other tasks that you don’t really need live information for, it can’t get you any information from past its cutoff point.
Provides actual sources for its claims, helping you dive deeper into any specific points and avoid hallucinations. Phind was the first to combine the best of both worlds between Google and ChatGPT, giving you easy access to actual sources the way Google does while summarizing relevant results the way ChatGPT does. It’s still one of the best places for that, especially if you have technical questions.
Bing AI: ChatGPT Alternative Based on GPT-4 (with internet access!)
(free no signup)
For all the hate Bing gets, they've done the best job of all the major search engines of integrating AI chat to answer questions. Bing's Chat AI is very similar to ChatGPT (it's based on GPT-4).
Unlike ChatGPT's base model without plugins, it has access to the internet. It also doesn't require signing in, which is nice.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Google has really dropped the ball lately in delivering non-spammy search results that actually answer the query, and it's nice to see other search engines like Bing and Phind providing alternatives.
Key Features:
Similar to Phind, though arguably a bit better for non-technical questions: Bing similarly provides sourced summaries, generates content and otherwise integrates AI and search nicely.
Built on top of GPT-4: like Taskade, Bing has confirmed they use GPT-4. That makes it another nice option to get around paying for GPT-4 while still getting much of the same capabilities as ChatGPT.
Seamless integration with a standard search engine that’s much better than I remember it being (when it was more of a joke than anything)
Honorable Mentions:
These are the “rest of the best” free AI tools I've found that are simpler/don't need a whole entry to explain:
PdfGPT: Alternative to ChatPDF that also uses AI to summarize and let you interact with PDF documents. Nice to have options if you run into one site’s PDF or page limit and don’t want to pay to do so.
Remove.bg: One of the few image AI tools I use regularly. Remove.bg uses simple AI to remove backgrounds from your images. It's very simple, but something I end up doing surprisingly often editing product images, etc.
CopyAI and Jasper: both are AI writing tools primarily built for website marketing/blog content. I've tried both but don't use them enough regularly to be able to recommend one over the other. Worth trying if you do a lot of content writing and want to automate parts of it.
Let me know if you guys recommend any other free AI tools that you use day-to-day and I can add them to the list.
I’m also interested in any requests you guys have for AI tools that don’t exist yet, as I’m looking for new projects to work on at the moment!
TL;DR:
ChatPDF: Interact with any PDF using ChatGPT without signing up, great for students and anyone who needs to filter through long PDFs.
Taskade: All-in-one task management, scheduling, and notetaking with built-in GPT-4 Chat + AI assistant for improving productivity.
Plus AI for Google Slides: Addon for Google Slides that generates and fine-tunes slide decks based on your description(s) in natural language.
FlowGPT: Database of AI prompts and workflows. Nice resource to find interesting ChatGPT prompts.
Summarize.Tech: AI summaries of YouTube videos with timestamps that makes it easier to find relevant information in longer videos.
Claude: ChatGPT alternative with a \~75k word limit, ideal for handling long documents and tasks that go above ChatGPT's token limit.
Phind: AI search engine similar to a combination of Google and ChatGPT. Built in internet access and links/citations for its claims.
Bing AI: Bing's ChatGPT alternative based on GPT-4. Has real-time internet access + integrates nicely with their normal search engine.
