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If you're like me, you may often feel frustrated by how everyone seems to have AIs doing all their work for them and making them bajillions of dollars, while you struggle to get it to generate a decent blog image.
The reality I've found is that to really get the benefit out of most AI tools requires:
If you fall into the solopreneur category, or you're just trying to make your day job easier, you probably won't want to shell out for a paid tool if you're not sure exactly what it can do. And you don't have the luxury of spending a day learning a tool that may turn out not to help that much.
If you've often found yourself giving up on fixing an AI tool's outputs and just doing it yourself, here's 5 useful AI tools for people who don't like AI. These either use AI in subtle ways to help you out, or have specific niche uses without much learning curve.
If you've not used Notion, it's a fancy note-taker much like Evernote, OneNote, etc. And yes all of these now have AI pouring out of every crevice.
Price: $96/year for the AI-powered version. Otherwise regular notion is free and still very useful.
But Notion's AI stays in the background and while it can do all sorts of wondrous things just by hitting the space bar, here's the kinds of things I use it for that makes organising my daily notes easier:
None of these will change your life. But if you take to even one of it's nifty little functions you'll find it changing a small way about how you work, and removing a little stressor from your day.
This is a really simple free tool for turning a random headshot into a social media profile - essential for anyone who does a bit of business through social channels, or just to make your LinkedIn shot look a bit more professional.
Pricing: Free
Not much to say about it. You upload your picture, remove the background, choose from one of the effects/backgrounds whatever, and download your new profile pic
Afforai is officially a research referencing tool, for researchers and students to find relevant references for papers, summarize then, and quickly go through their papers and spit out a beautifully formatted references list.
Pricing: Free plan available, $3.99/month for students. Pro plans $7.99 and up
However, it can do much more than that. Imagine you're an account manager who receives dozens of emails from clients every day, and each email could be filled with a bunch of tasks or questions, or it could be full of smalltalk.
Afforai is great at going through today's emails and extracting a few bullet points (with references!) detailing what all those emails want from you.
That turns a task that could take 30 minutes every day (and send you down a rabbit hole) into something that happens automatically as you're sitting down with your coffee
While Canva is great for general-purpose media making, Photoroom excels at turning just about any image of an object into glossy product shots that look better than any other AI generated content I've seen.
Pricing: Free plan available but to do much of anything it'll be about $35/month
It's lightning-fast, and somehow just knows what you're looking for most of the time. It's not only excellent at removing backgrounds, it also has some contextual awareness of what the object is, and which backgrounds tend to be used with such objects.
It dynamically adjusts lighting, shadows, reflections, etc. to suit the chosen background, and does it all so quickly it makes Canva look like a clumsy meatbrain.
Synthesia
This one is pretty niche, but not as niche as you might think. Create.xyz is a no-code web app creator. It excels at creating simple applications that perform specific tasks.
Price: $99/Month if you want to publish your app on your own website. Free* if you just want to play with it yourself.
"What would I need it for?" You ask? Well, I used it to make a simple app to help me calculate my taxes for a year where my income was all over the show in lots of different forms, and it was WAY faster than trying to do it myself and cheaper than hiring an accountant.
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