The AI Age: Personal and Professional Uses for Apps Beyond ChatGPT

The last few years have been a wild ride for artificial intelligence. What used to be a mysterious black box is now an increasingly visible tool in the business world—and there's no end in sight. ChatGPT is just one of the many examples. It is built on the OpenAI framework and already showcases impressive language capabilities that can make it past even the most discerning editor. 

And that's just the beginning. With the "wet paint" sign still on many AI tools, we're excited about the endless possibilities that AI technology presents for businesses looking to streamline their operations and boost their productivity. Watching early adopters use AI in novel ways provides hints for where the technology will go as more UX, discovery, user research, and development are applied to it.

Here are eight of our favorite new AI tools, sorted into the four buckets that the current AI tools fall into: automation, choice facilitation, content creation, and search engines (or data sifting).

1. Automation

One of the immediate benefits of AI is automating tedious tasks that consume disproportionate amounts of time. Why bother with boring jobs anymore? With AI ready and willing to do the heavy lifting, you can turn your focus to more important things, like binging that show you’ve been dying to watch. 

By automating routine tasks in business or personal life, employees can finally break free from the chains of manual labor and instead focus on higher-value activities that help drive growth, innovate, and create new opportunities. Automation can help minimize errors and improve accuracy, which is a must-have for financial reporting or compliance.

Snipd

For personal use

What is it: Tap your headphones to save a snippet of the podcast you’re listening to and record an AI-generated transcript, summary, and title. Export your saved highlights to Notion, Readwise, or more. Refer back to the audio moment or start a conversation with it.

Uses: You’re on a walk listening to a podcast and hear something brilliant. With just a tap, you can save that idea. You’ll also be able to see what other users are highlighting in an episode, so you can have a quick shortcut to brilliant nuggets of information.

Fullstory

For business use

What is it: FullStory is like having a backstage pass to your website. With its ability to track every mouse click and page visit, it creates a "story" of a visitor's journey that can reveal valuable insights into user behavior. 

Uses: With FullStory's AI automation, businesses can understand what visitors really want and make changes that increase conversions. Say goodbye to tedious manual tracking and hello to cost savings, customer retention, and improved UX.

2. Choice Facilitation

More choices. More data. More overwhelm. Making the right or best choice can seem impossible, but AI makes it easier. By sifting through mountains of data to cut through the noise, these tools can simplify even the most complex decisions. 

This is particularly important in industries like insurance, where insurers can better evaluate risk, assess claims, and make more accurate predictions. And for other industries, AI-powered decision-making tools can help to optimize everything from supply chain management to marketing strategies.

WatchNow AI

For personal use

What is it: When one member of your household can’t get enough of Harry Potter, but you’ve had it with the boy wizard, try branching out. Created by Joe Webber, WatchNow takes your favorite movies and suggests a few related ones you might love. Add as many movie titles as you can for optimal results.

Uses: Maybe just for fun, but this AI tool could make finding a similar movie you’ve never heard of before easier. Rather than hunting through long lists of must-see movies, you just need to remember similar movies and plug them into the choice generator.

SAS® 

For business use

What is it: ​​SAS® is the wingman you never knew you needed. With its fully integrated, open-source, cloud-native technology platform, you can explore, analyze, and visualize data like never before. And it's not just for data scientists, business analysts, statisticians, or forecasters–anyone can use it to unlock the secrets hidden in their data.

Uses: Want to understand what's happening in your business? Predict the future? Drive your progress? With SAS®’s powerful analytics tools, you can turn your data into valuable insights to help you make informed decisions and take your business to the next level.

3. Content Creation

When it comes to content creation, AI can be a valuable tool for businesses looking to improve their processes. No matter what you need, AI-powered tools can help you generate ideas, optimize content for search engines, and even create entire pieces of content from scratch. 

Don't worry. You don't have to be a creative genius to use these tools. Think of AI as your virtual content assistant, providing inspiration and guidance. By automating specific content creation tasks, your business can save time and resources that you can reinvest in other areas of the company. 

GPTZero

For personal or business use

What is it: You get a zero! And you get a zero! And every one that cheated gets a zero! Naturally, with the boom in AI-generated content, teachers are concerned with plagiarized content. So while GPTZero doesn’t fit neatly into the content creation bucket, it does detect AI-generated content. Send the copy through this to find out if it’s 100% authentic or just scraped from the web.

Uses: For anyone grading papers in the internet age, this AI tool could help them stay one step ahead of students. Keep students honest with the threat of running through an AI tool that can outsmart their AI tool.

Descript

For business use

What is it: Descript offers a new way to make video and podcasts. This AI-powered tool automatically transcribes your audio and video recordings, making them as editable as a written text.

Uses: With Descript's AI magic, you can remove pesky background noise, catch those annoying filler words (looking at you, "um" and "uh"), and even insert synthesized versions of your own voice. Plus, with the Overdub feature, you can fix those flubs and faux pas with a few clicks.

4. Search Engines (Data Sifting)

You might think Google has this category locked down (the tech behemoth controls over 90% of the search market), but AI is shaking things up. With their ability to analyze vast amounts of data, AI-powered search engines can provide users with a more nuanced understanding of their data.

This means better decision-making based on more accurate and comprehensive data for businesses. And let's not forget the benefits of automation in data analysis, which can save time and resources while increasing accuracy. Whether you're looking to gain insights into customer behavior, optimize your marketing strategies, or stay ahead of the competition, AI-powered search engines are worth exploring.

Perplexity AI

For personal or business use

What is it: Perplexity is a conversational search engine (also available as a Chrome extension) that returns multiple results summed up in a couple of sentences. It provides sources, allowing you to check its accuracy, and since it’s still in the training stages, you should check the accuracy of the results.

Uses: Ask a question or search for an answer with keywords, then follow up with a refining question in the same search “thread.” It provides an answer and sources, usually including more than one website.

Bonus Use: Perplexity also includes Bird SQL, a search engine for Twitter that sifts through publicly available information like users, follows, likes, and tweets. 

Neeva

For personal or business use

​​What is it: Neeva is an AI-powered search engine that doesn't track or bombard you with ads. It crawls billions of pages daily and delivers lightning-fast, up-to-date, and relevant results, all without advertisers artificially inflating the results.

Uses: Its unique AI-powered search stack provides a real-time encyclopedia-like search experience with summarized answers and integrated citations. And if it can't generate an answer, it reverts to the conventional search display. It’s like having a personalized research assistant at your fingertips.

Is AI the Answer to All of Our Problems?

Entrepreneurs and business owners might be asking themselves “What next?” as they try to figure out whether they should capitalize on this technology.

It’s a little like the wild west in the AI world right now. Hundreds of AI-based tools and services are out there, many of them free. Some applications promise amazing results and have legitimate use cases. Others seem like weak knock-offs. At this point, it feels like the dot-com boom, with plenty of business ideas to explore and enormous potential.

While AI-powered tools have the potential to revolutionize many aspects of business, it's important to note that they are not a one-size-fits-all solution. For example, while ChatGPT and other AI language learning tools may have advanced language capabilities, they cannot replace the importance of a well-designed user experience or the value of custom app development. 

As the CEO of ChatGPT himself has stated, this technology has the potential to disrupt capitalism—but that doesn't mean it can build a SaaS product for you. To leverage the power of AI, it's crucial to prioritize UX, discovery, user research, custom design, and development. Entrepreneurs ready to explore how to apply AI to tedious business processes stand at the edge of the frontier, ready for a new adventure. Partner with a team as excited to explore AI-powered applications as you are.