The most effective AI tools for research, writing, planning, and creativity

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.

The most powerful AI tools don’t just save time; they expand our consideration of what’s possible. These assistants help us consider 5 or 10 times the number of creative options we’d otherwise think about.

AI tools I consistently rely on

Research and analysis

• Perplexity: Unlike Google’s long list of links, Perplexity delivers concise, citation-backed summaries that work like a “presidential brief.” This is perfect when you need to quickly understand consumer patterns, industry trends, or a complex topic.
• NotebookLM (and Claude Projects): Upload your own documents, examples, and data to get personalized AI assistance. That ensures the replies to your prompts are anchored in your own materials and context. Now you can work with huge collections of information more efficiently and creatively.

Communication efficiency

• Letterly and other voice-to-text AI tools like AudioPen and Oasis have transformed how I capture ideas. I call this “bionic dictation” because these tools don’t just transcribe your voice but transform it into organized text. This is particularly powerful for people—like me—who think out loud. As you think aloud, your AI assistant acts as an “idea mirror,” reflecting back to you a coherent summary of your own key points
• Shortwave: This email tool uses AI to help you find messages using natural language rather than exact keywords. Many of us waste huge amounts of time hunting for messages. Shortwave helps.

Multimedia creation

• Gamma (and Beautiful.ai) Create pro quality presentations without design skills. Spin up slide drafts quickly from a link, a doc, a detailed prompt, or an outline. Experiment with multiple styles quickly & easily. Spend time thinking and strategizing, not fussing with menus.
• Hypernatural For quick video creation, paste in text, a link to a newsletter or blog post, or give it some text, audio, or video. From virtually any raw material you provide it will create an original video you can revise.
• Eddie Edit video with simple text prompts. I recently trimmed an hour long workshop to an eight-minute highlight video just by instructing Eddie into what sections were most important using natural language.
• Descript Edit audio and video without any technical expertise. The AI removes background noise, sound gaps and filler words. And you can customize your project by trimming the transcript just as you’d edit any text document. 

AI tactics that work surprisingly well

Reverse interviews

Instead of just querying AI, have it interview you. Get the AI to interview you, rather than interviewing it. Give it a little context and what you’re focusing on and what you’re interested in, and then you ask it to interview you to elicit your own insights.

This approach helps extract knowledge from yourself, not just from the AI. Sometimes we need that guide to pull ideas out of ourselves.

AI-assisted planning

AI is particularly helpful for strategic planning. Try this: create a Claude Project—or a ChatGPT Project—and detail for your AI assistant your objectives and operating context. Have it help you think through a plan for the next month based on your goals.

The benefit is comprehensive thinking. Our planning falls short when we’ve left something out. We’ve forgotten to consider various factors or haven’t fully analyzed how things could go wrong.

Identify writing weaknesses

Give an AI assistant like Gemini, Copilot, Claude, or ChatGPT text you’ve written, with a prompt asking for specific feedback. For example:

• Ask for questions your writing should answer but doesn’t yet.
• Prompt for a blind spot or a key point a critic might say you’ve missed.
• Tell your AI aid to point out a section of your text that’s boring or bland.

This approach elevates your work. In this paradigm, your assistant isn’t writing for you. It’s giving you objective feedback on your work and helping you strengthen your own eye for edits. It’s pushing you to reach a higher standard.

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.

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