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8 AI-powered Apps That'll Actually Save You Time
HomeArtificial Intelligence8 AI-powered apps that'll actually save you time
by JR Raphael Contributing Editor
Credit: nexusby / Shutterstock You can't open your eyes these days without seeing something about generative AI and all the reasons it's, like, totally gonna revolutionize the way you work.
And yet, call me surly, but most of the AI tools out there at this point seem far less impressive in practice than they do on paper. By and large, it's the same sort of subpar stuff squeezed into slightly different places, with little in the way of concern around quality or reliability.
Yes, we get it: We can now summon answers of questionable accuracy, generate text of questionable quality and originality, and create images of — well, questionable quality and originality. Do we really need those functions in every possible surface?
Beneath all the hype, though, the generative AI systems at the heart of this movement genuinely do have some practical value. You've just gotta dig to get past the underwhelming also-rans and uncover the truly thoughtful, carefully conceived places where the technology is being put to good use.
But hey, you don't have to get your hands dirty. I've had my metaphorical shovel out for months now as I've sifted through the rubble to find the buried diamonds — the standout AI-infused apps that actually enhance your workday productivity and add meaningful value into your life.
Here are eight such treasures you probably haven't heard of that are well worth your while to try.
Part I: Documents and presentations 1. ChatPDFThe next time someone sends you a sprawling document that looks about as interesting to read as a tax return, remember the website ChatPDF.
ChatPDF — which notably is a strictly web-based tool and not the same as any mobile apps that share its moniker — does exactly what its name suggests: It lets you upload any PDF or even DOC/DOCX file and then ask questions about the file to get quick 'n' simple information.
You can ask for a simple summary, or you can dive into super-specific questions about the material within. You can even upload multiple documents together and then ask questions that pertain to all of them at the same time. However you go about it, it's a fast and easy way to get the info you need without having to read pages upon pages of monotonous material.
ChatPDF makes it easy to get info from a long document without having to read it in its entirety.
ChatPDF makes it easy to get info from a long document without having to read it in its entirety.
JR Raphael / IDG
ChatPDF makes it easy to get info from a long document without having to read it in its entirety.
JR Raphael / IDG
JR Raphael / IDG
ChatPDF claims to be able to summarize documents in any language and chat in any language worldwide. The service is free for up to two documents a day, with each being as much as 120 pages and up to 10MB in size — a generous limit that'll probably be plenty for most casual purposes. If you do need more than that, the service offers a premium plan that gives you unlimited uploads with up to 2,000 pages and 32MB per document for $140 a year.
ChatPDF promises that all data is stored securely, easy to delete upon request, and never shared in any way with anyone — but even so, it might be wise to avoid uploading any especially sensitive company-related documents and to use the service only for more casual, non-confidential-material-involving purposes. Better safe than sorry, right?
2. Beautiful.AiWhen it comes to professional presentation creation, it simply doesn't get any better than Beautiful.Ai.
Beautiful.Ai takes the typically painful process of building a presentation and makes it not only easy but also almost enjoyable. The web-based app relies on artificial intelligence to help you format and design slides and make 'em look polished and professional without any real effort — and with any specific parameters or company brand guidelines you have in mind.
You can claim as much control over the look of your slides as you want, but the best part of Beautiful.Ai is how it just intelligently adapts the design for you as you go and makes it look good, no matter what you might be doing. It's "design AI," in a sense, and it's shockingly impressive.
Beautiful.Ai does also offer some more typical generative AI elements. You can ask the service to create a specific type of presentation for you, and it'll not only format and design the thing but also pull in publicly available data and do all the heavy lifting. And while the result likely won't be exactly what you need (and will require thorough fact-checking along with a fair amount of rewriting), its initial output could eliminate a lot of legwork and give you a time-saving head start for refining.
Beautiful.Ai created this entire collection of slides in about five seconds, with a prompt to build a presentation about workplace transformation and the future of work.
Beautiful.Ai created this entire collection of slides in about five seconds, with a prompt to build a presentation about workplace transformation and the future of work.
JR Raphael / IDG
Beautiful.Ai created this entire collection of slides in about five seconds, with a prompt to build a presentation about workplace transformation and the future of work.
JR Raphael / IDG
JR Raphael / IDG
All in all, it's a recipe that changes the way you think about presentations and will absolutely spoil you for all other such software.
Beautiful.Ai costs $144 a year for individuals or $480 per user per year on a collaborative team plan. It also has a $45-per-project a la carte option.
Part II: Email 3. SuperhumanIf there's one AI-oriented tool that's really struck a chord with me, personally, it's the newly launched Ask AI feature within the Superhuman email app. No exaggeration: My jaw literally dropped the first few times I tried it and saw what it was capable of accomplishing and how much of a difference it'd make in my own email-centric workflow.
Superhuman, if you aren't aware, is a cross-platform app that gives you a highly optimized, efficiency-oriented interface for interacting with your email. It's designed for people who spend tons of time in their inboxes and wade through oceans of email every day.
And its Ask AI feature fits brilliantly within that framing. While using any of the service's desktop apps — the native Windows or Mac programs or the web-based browser version — you can simply hit the question mark key from anywhere to pull up the new Ask AI prompt.
From there, you can type out any plain-English question or command related to anything in your email. And while you could just use that as a simpler way to search and find specific messages, the real power comes from asking for actual information contained within an email or even a series of emails. It's a massive time-saver that makes regular ol' searching seem almost antiquated in comparison.
For example, you might ask:
These are all actual examples I've tried in my own inbox. And the results have consistently been fast, accurate, and helpful — noticeably more so than with Google's own occasionally available Gemini-in-Gmail equivalent.
Superhuman's new Ask AI feature makes it easy to find specific answers and info from anywhere in your inbox.
Superhuman's new Ask AI feature makes it easy to find specific answers and info from anywhere in your inbox.
JR Raphael / IDG
Superhuman's new Ask AI feature makes it easy to find specific answers and info from anywhere in your inbox.
JR Raphael / IDG
JR Raphael / IDG
The Ask AI feature is included as a part of all Superhuman subscriptions, which run $30 a month or $25 a month paid annually. The feature is in the midst of rolling out to all users on the desktop front now and is expected to expand to the service's mobile apps sometime this summer.
Part III: Calendar 4. DolaFor all the productivity progress tech has brought us in recent years, one simple-seeming task that remains vexingly cumbersome is interacting with your calendar.
Dola does wonders for making that chore easy. In short, it's an AI chatbot that integrates with your choice of four standard messaging platforms — WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, and Apple Messages (a.K.A. IMessage) — and then connects directly to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or any other calendar that supports the CalDAV protocol. (Microsoft Outlook, unfortunately, doesn't make this easy, though you can use a third-party plugin like the favorably reviewed Caldavsynchronizer to bridge the gap.)
If you aren't already using one of those messaging services, you can simply fire up a free account explicitly for this purpose. That's what I did, with Telegram.
Then, once you add Dola into the service and connect it to your calendar, you can send Dola messages right within the regular chat app to accomplish everything from creating new events to canceling or moving existing appointments and also asking conversational questions about anything on your agenda.
Dola lets you interact with your calendar via simple commands in messaging apps you're already using.
JR Raphael / IDG
Dola can also generate all sorts of information for you and add it into your calendar events — things like lists of popular lunch spots in a specific area or even ideas for company slogans.
Dola is free to use for now, during the service's early access phase. Its founders say there'll eventually be some manner of paid, premium option.
Part IV: Notes and transcriptions 5. FathomI think we can all agree that Zoom meetings — along with Google Meet meetings, Microsoft Teams meetings, and all other kinds of virtual meetings — are objectively the worst.
And while AI can't (yet) keep you from having to sit through those virtual torture sessions, an app called Fathom can make 'em much more tolerable.
Fathom runs quietly in the background on your computer and then automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes all of your video calls. You can search through or share its summaries and even sync 'em directly into other productivity tools such as Slack or Asana if you want.
But even if you just stick with the basics, the app lets you relax and stop worrying about taking notes or missing something important — because you know it's listening along with you and jotting down every last word along with a simple summary of the high points.
Using Fathom is like having a super-focused personal assistant in all of your virtual meetings.
JR Raphael / IDG
Fathom requires a Windows or Mac computer for its local software, and it currently supports English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and German. You can either activate its recording manually in each meeting or opt to connect it to your Google or Microsoft calendar and allow it to automatically record any Zoom, Meet, or Teams call on your agenda.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and Fathom says it does not train AI models on customer data. (See more details about the company's security and compliance practices in its Trust Center.)
Best of all? The service is completely free to use for those core features, with absolutely no limitations around the number or length of calls it'll record and then store. The company makes its money by selling an optional premium subscription that adds in features like advanced AI summaries, AI-generated action items and follow-up emails, systems for team management, and integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Close, and Zapier.
6. Whisper WebTranscribing a video call is fine and dandy — but what about when you want to turn a regular phone call, an in-person meeting, or an already-recorded conversation into text for simple searching and future referencing?
An open-source web app called Whisper Web is the answer. Whisper Web relies on OpenAI's Whisper AI system to offer on-demand, real-time transcription right in your browser. It actually downloads the associated generative AI model and runs it right on your own device, which means your data never leaves that computer, phone, or tablet or gets sent to a remote server for processing.
Whisper Web works swiftly and efficiently right on your own device — and right inside your browser.
JR Raphael / IDG
Whisper Web can record audio live from your microphone or import audio from an existing file you already have ready. Its creators say it's trained on multilingual data and able to support on-the-fly translation from other languages into English, too. And it's completely free to use, without the need for any accounts or sign-ins.
7. Summarize.TechWhen you've got YouTube on your to-do list and you have neither the time nor the patience to sit and watch an entire work-related video — say, a presentation of some sort, a marathon company keynote, or maybe a boring-as-can-be board meeting — a splendid site called Summarize.Tech will make your life instantly easier.
Summarize.Tech takes any YouTube link you feed it and generates an on-demand transcript of the entire clip in seconds. It breaks the video down into broadly summarized sections and lets you click on any section to expand it and dive into deeper, more specific summaries within. It can even take videos in other languages, including Spanish and French, and translate and then summarize them in English for you.
You can save yourself tons of time by letting Summarize.Tech summarize and transcribe lengthy videos for you.
You can save yourself tons of time by letting Summarize.Tech summarize and transcribe lengthy videos for you.
JR Raphael / IDG
You can save yourself tons of time by letting Summarize.Tech summarize and transcribe lengthy videos for you.
JR Raphael / IDG
JR Raphael / IDG
Summarize.Tech is free for "a few" videos per day. For anything more than that, the service offers a $10-a-month premium plan that raises the limit to 200 videos a month.
8. AudioPenLast but not least, if you take lots of notes on the go, an AI-infused app called AudioPen is a tough tool to beat.
AudioPen is kind of like a dumping ground for any and all of your passing thoughts. Whenever something occurs to you — an idea for a client proposal, a potential project for your company's upcoming quarter, or anything else imaginable — you just hit the record button within the service and yammer away.
AudioPen stores a complete audio recording of your ramblings and also cooks up near-instant plain-text summaries of everything you say, automatically editing out filler words and repetition. Each individual recording then becomes a note in your virtual notebook. You can search through the text, translate it into another language, and interact with it in all sorts of potentially useful ways from there.
AudioPen transforms any manner of rambling into concise, organized notes for ongoing reference.
JR Raphael / IDG
Like many of the other tools in this collection, AudioPen is completely web-based — which means it works on any device, be it a phone, tablet, or computer, and it doesn't require any downloads or installations. You can, however, opt to install it as a progressive web app if you want a more native-feeling app-like experience.
AudioPen is free for recordings up to three minutes in length and with up to 10 stored notes at a time. An optional $99-a-year (or $159-for-two-years) premium plan eliminates those limitations and adds in a slew of extra features, including customizable styles for your summaries, summaries across multiple notes, and a simple system for sharing any notes you want to make public.
Related contentHow AI Is Having An 'App-Etizing' Impact On Application Development
Fabio Caversan is Vice President of Digital Business and Innovation at Stefanini, driving new product offerings and digital transformation.
gettyThe widespread excitement around AI—specifically the consumer-facing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT—has raised the profile of AI tools in popular consciousness. It has also prompted many decision-makers at companies around the world to ask pointed questions about how they can leverage the power of these game-changing new tools for their own benefit.
AI tools are not new. What is new, however, is the way in which LLM-based AI tools can be leveraged in innovative and impactful ways, perhaps most notably in the application development process. Appreciating the extent to which AI is elevating application development more broadly may provide an important and instructive window into the longer-term potential for this type of technology to have a profound impact across a wide range of industries and use cases.
A Diverse And Dynamic SpecialtyApplication development is a specialty where skilled professionals may be asked to deliver any type of application with features based on a wide range of client requests. An automaker may request a connected car app. A banking client might ask a tech partner to develop a solution that can manage all the heavy lifting for back-office operations and execute internal workflows.
Those development processes can range from relatively modest to extraordinarily challenging and time-consuming. Especially with larger projects, it is not hard to see how AI-powered efficiencies could make a significant positive impact.
Two AI PillarsThere are really two different types of uses for integrating AI tools into applications. The first is the one that has been around longer, where more traditional AI models (not LLMs) can be leveraged to identify insights from large volumes of data.
For example, you can run an AI model on a list of reported customer incidents with an application or customer process to sort and categorize those incidents and provide more insight into their causes and prevalence. This may not only identify the biggest problems but also inform an application developer's approach to fixing them. By training AI on tech tickets generated from bug reports or other issues, it is possible to efficiently address the root causes of those issues and drastically decrease future incidents.
The second use of AI in application development is improving the efficiency of the team. This is a space where the rapid pace of innovation is being driven primarily by LLM-based AI tools that are transforming application development in profound ways.
AI tools are being leveraged at virtually every stage of the development workflow, from gathering customer requirements to analyzing the problems and designing, testing and deploying solutions. LLMs can make things faster and more efficient (sometimes dramatically so) throughout that development lifecycle.
Transformative EfficiencyRegardless of the different lifecycles or operational specifics used when building an application, it all starts with working to understand the client's business needs. From brainstorming and strategy development to creating a roadmap, building the application, assessing requirements and teambuilding—and throughout the entire app development and digital delivery process—AI can feature prominently.
Early in the development process, AI tools can be used for:
• Brainstorming ideas
• Lean inception and design thinking
• Identifying market benchmarks
• Creating personas and suggesting different user journeys to better understand the customer and how the features will affect them (which helps define the scope of work)
• Running a risk analysis
• Identifying personnel availability and matching roles based on regional and skill-specific availability
On the design side, AI can help with:
• Requirements gathering
• Providing guidance to prototype
• Taking advantage of behavior-driven development (BDD) and starting testing even before the code is done
• Informing the UX/UI approach
Once development begins in earnest, AI becomes a time-saving powerhouse, with LLM-based tools that can deliver:
• Code optimization and code performance (providing coding suggestions or examples, performing coding tasks and generating documentation)
• Debugging, bug fixing and building code fixes for errors
• DevOps
• Enhancing the quality assurance process by automating testing steps like generating and running test scripts, and following a task list
• Continuous improvement
• Enhancing communication by translating to and from virtually any spoken, written or programming languages
The quality assurance functionality alone can significantly reduce the number of hours and professionals required for testing. We've found regression testing time can be reduced by more than 90% compared to traditional methods.
Building Proprietary AI ToolsFor all the power of AI tools, the public-facing nature of LLM-based AI platforms is problematic from a security standpoint. Because solutions like ChatGPT would expose private and proprietary company and client information, many tech companies are either hosting an LLM model in a private and secure environment or are developing their own versions of these tools to use in specific ways to drive improvement in internal processes.
The key for any application developer is ensuring they train the model to provide the right answers. These LLM tools are only as good as the information they ingest, and pre-training a tool is essential to getting it to function the way you need it to.
With a library of tools and prompts in place, the application developer is like an artist with an endless palette of AI functionality they can call upon to streamline and supercharge the app development process. With the right UI, the game-changing power of LLM-based AI can be utilized in entirely customized ways, all with drag-and-drop and cut-and-paste simplicity.
Artificial Intelligence, Authentic GainsGiven the extent to which increasingly powerful and customized AI tools are already transforming the application development space, it is not unreasonable to think that these assets will continue to significantly increase efficiency throughout the application development lifecycle. But the truly exciting thing about AI in application development is not just the automation and efficiency, but the full scope of ways in which these tools are providing conceptual and procedural support—including creative concepts and idea generation.
The bottom line? AI makes it possible for application development professionals to deliver faster and deliver better, increasing quality, decreasing time-to-market and improving overall user satisfaction in the process.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
The Promise And Perils Of Building AI Into Your Business Applications
Anand Oswal, SVP & GM of Network Security, Palo Alto Networks.
gettyArtificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of business innovation. But although AI feels like a relatively new concept, 83% of technology service providers already use generative AI in their businesses.
Business use of AI apps spans nearly every type of application, including supply chain optimization, process automation, customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, data analysis, logistics monitoring, fraud detection, competitive intelligence and more. But there are risks involved with this new technology. Take, for example:
• Airlines, hotels and online travel businesses are building LLM-powered virtual assistants to let you self-manage your bookings. But what if the organization rushed that application to market without considering supply chain vulnerabilities in the app ecosystem—including corrupt AI and machine learning (ML) packages and model vulnerabilities?
• Pharmaceutical enterprises are trying to use their past research, trials and outcomes to train models, thereby accelerating their ability to take their next drug to the market. But what if the organization leverages an open-source model that was trained on poisoned data, leading to incorrect or misleading trial results?
• Real estate companies are building online apps to help you find your next property and build the most appropriate offer based on the market data. But what if the application was subject to prompt injection attacks that let bad actors arbitrage the market at the expense of everyday home buyers?
No matter where you may sit on the AI adoption spectrum, it's clear that the businesses that are embracing AI are winning a competitive edge. But it's not as easy as plugging an AI model into your existing infrastructure stack and calling it a win. You're adding a whole new AI stack, including the model, supply chain, plug-ins and agents—and then giving it access to sensitive internal data for both training and inference. This brings a whole new set of complexities to the security game.
So, how does a business harness the potential of AI without compromising security?
• The journey to securing AI-powered applications starts with discovery. You must be able to see every component of your AI app ecosystem—including AI apps, models, inference and training datasets, and plug-ins.
• Next, you must understand your security posture to identify and remediate against possible risks in the supply chain and the configuration, as well as data exposure risks to your AI apps. By identifying your highest-risk applications, you can investigate your training dataset risks and potential level of risk to your organization.
• Then, you must protect against runtime risks. These are the risks your app is exposed to once it's deployed and exposed to the outside world. Attackers are aware of the speed at which new AI applications are being developed and rushed to market, and they've devised an increasing arsenal of AI-specific attacks in the hopes of exploiting new, untested components and weaknesses in the overall security posture of these applications. Enveloping your AI application components with runtime protection mechanisms helps you shield your model against misuse—like prompt injection techniques to leak your customer data or attackers using your models to generate malware.
The promises of AI can't be overstated. But the risks must be acknowledged with the same fervor to see it live up to its full potential. A comprehensive security solution will help you confidently build AI-powered apps by securing your journey to AI, from design to build to run.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
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