I Tried 350+ AI Tools, These 7 Will Save You 10+ Hours a Week

So many people click AI tools like apps on their phone. They would download it, try it for a week, and then completely forgot about it. There's so much noise in the AI space right now, but nobody's. talking about which tools are hype and which one is actually useful. Hi, I'm Lori. I previously worked at Google, where I developed tech and digital training programs for businesses, and after testing hundreds of tools and training professionals on AI, I narrow my own workflow down to seven that I reach for almost every single day. That powers 90% of my work. The first one up I want to talk about is chat bots.

These are various language. models are available at the moment ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. And you're probably thinking which one do I actually use? That's the best for me. Now I want to address something that comes up often and constantly. when I'm training others on the AI. The assumption that all these general AI tools are basically the same, that it doesn't really matter which one you use, but that's just not true. And using them randomly is actually not a great strategy. So after a lot of trial and error with these tools. in my own workflow and research, target is the most obedient model.

If you give it a complex set of instructions. with lots of moving parts, it follows them to the letter. It doesn't skip steps or decide it knows better, which is really useful. if you're in a line of work that you need to make sure. everything's follow to a tee. So, for example, let's say you are in law. and you need to review documents against a very specific checklist. Start with target as a safe as option. So cloud is different. Besides being a great product now that includes cloud Co-work and cloud code. which I'll touch on in this video.

and also in this video series that are coming soon on AI learning. They're just too much to cover in one video, so. close writing is just better. It produces better first drafts. The writing's on the more human y test against other models, and you need fewer revisions. And when you share examples of your existing work and your tone of voice, it matches your voice. So your writing actually sounds like you and I use claw to draft presentations, emails, proposals, and anything where the tone matters as much as the content itself. And for code, if you're into vibe coding, cloud writes.

functional code in the first try more consistently than anything else. I've used, and Gemini is amazing. If you currently are a heavy Google Workspace user, plus it just has a much bigger and larger context window. So that means that if you need to get a lengthy video analyze or a long slide. deck, or let's say a multi massive page request from the client, you can get all these processes in Gemini without any issue. And if you need to find something within your long email chains in Gmail.

or let's say, a very obscure document that you can't remember in the folder. in a Google Drive. Gemini really shines through in those cases to help you. save time and locate them and work off the back of them within your Gemini chat. So basically, pick the right chat bot for the right. job really can help you to get the right results each time. Now there's one specialist AI two I want to share with you, which. I just love pairing up with my everyday AI chatbot assistance. And that's perplexity. So perplexity is designed to find accurate information.

that oftentimes are just missed out by models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, who might hallucinate from time to time on the information. So if your work requires you to have accurate source. based information, make sure the AI perplexity to your AI to stack. For example, if I was working the research report. for my client or running a gas background information for the author's. AI interview on this channel, I want to make sure. that the cited research are actually verified by perplexity. as a double layer of checks for what ChatGPT or Claude created.

And one more tip on this is that if you want to limit your research. to just one specific source, you can use this prompt here. And this narrows your research down to one specific source. This next one is whisper Flow. I have to be honest, I didn't like text to speech features on my own. My computer, or even one phone. Apps had it for a very long time. because I just didn't find it enough to actually make it worthwhile. So I get really frustrated. of having to edit everything and get back to typing anyway. And I started testing out Whisper Flow purely out of desperation.

I want to dictate a quick response to my team while I was on the walk, chasing my very active daughter out in the playground. But what I found through my experience is that it was so much faster. because we typically speak at 200 words per minute, and we typically type. a 50 words per minute, so I can produce writing four times. as fast, capturing my thoughts on notes, dictating. AI prompts that will have taken me so much longer to type out word by word. And what I liked about this tool. is that it doesn't just transcribe, it cleans as a listen. See?

So if you change your mind mid-sentence or made a mistake, it figures out what you meant. And if you say let's say ten times, which happens when we're thinking out. loud, right? It removes them and what comes out the other side is just really clean. and coherent text that you can send out or save as notes. So try it out for yourself. I started using it just for a few things, and now it's the point. that I literally can't go through a day without it on my phone and on my computer. By the way, I put together a free AI playbook that includes links. to my favorite AI tools to help you build your own AI workflow from scratch.

It covers the tools, the prompts, and the systems I actually use. You can grab your copy in the description below. This next tool is called gamma and this who was created. from the frustration of the founder, who wasn't really a design guy himself. When he was working in the corporate environment. So that's pretty much like me designing presentations. that don't actually showcase the idea in the best way. So many of us who are not natural designers, there's this design text that most people pay without even realizing it. And I felt this first hand across my whole entire career.

When you build together a pitch for a client and the design wasn't good, then the idea, no matter how good it was, it won't land the way that deserve to. because we judge the quality of thinking how it looks on the slide. And that's just the human nature, isn't it? So the problem is great design. It takes time, skill and tools that most people just haven't been trained on. And gamma helped me a lot with this. So here I share my existing website and branding with gamma, and then gamma design this entire climb deck. that is really consistent but yet beautifully created.

It really is much better and way faster. than what most people, including myself, could create when doing it manually. So if you wanna try it out, head to the link in the description. It's free to get started. It might save you hours in your presentation. And thanks so much for gamma for sponsoring this video. The next tool is notebook LM. So here's something I don't think get talked about enough. We are living in the most information. rich moment in human history, and most of us were drowning in it. You could probably relate to this, right? I'm a naturally very curious person. I love reading, I love listening to podcasts, watching.

videos, coming across ideas that made me think differently. But when I actually needed something, let's say a useful framework I come across. Six months ago, something from maybe a podcast I half remembered. I couldn't find it. It was just buried somewhere across my notes, my browser tabs. and my save articles. You name it. Anywhere. And the time I spent looking for. it was honestly worse than just starting from scratch. But here's the thing that made it worse. And even when I did find the source again, asked a general AI chat bot about it.

and no way to verify whether it told me it was actually accurate, and most AI models would give you a confident answer. whether or not it's grounded in anything real. And when you're creating content. training clients, using it work, or making decisions based on. that information, that matters a lot and it matters to me. So that's a problem that nobody LMS solves for me. And it solves in a way that no other two does. So you can upload your own sources PDFs, YouTube videos, articles, research. papers, your own notes, and then notebook LM only answers from when you give it.

It won't go off and invent something or hallucinate a statistic that sounds. reasonable, which tools like ChatGPT will do a lot of times in my experience. So it will stay within the walls of your own material and cite exactly. where that information came from. So you can actually check everything. And beyond this, you can also ask to turn your research into, let's say, a quiz, a structure summary, a mind map or even the podcast. All audio overview with two AI host discussing your notes. to help you learn new concepts,

which I found really helpful for me to speed up my own learning. And I use that feature on long research sessions. That it was just generally useful was one of the best ways. I found to actually retain information rather than just consuming it. So when accuracy matters more than speed, you need to that stays grounded in your sources. Then give us two. We'll try. This next tool is called granola. Let's talk about meetings for a minute here. Most of us are spending a huge chunk of our weeks in them, and we're doing this thing where we're half listening, we're half swapping down notes, and somehow ended up with.

neither a good set of notes or the memory of what was actually decided. during that meeting. Right. So I meeting tools. I've tried to solve this, but most of them they do in a way that creates a new problem. They send this bot into your meeting, which is my biggest bugbear. And if you've ever been in a meeting recently where someone I bought. joins uninvited, you know how that goes. People get really annoyed. So granola works differently. He uses your system audio to capture the meeting in the background. There are no bots are joins.

There's nobody know that it's there. And you can jot down rough notes during the call. the way you normally would in a text box, if you like. Within the app. I just don't do them anymore because I like to focus in the meeting instead. And then afterwards, granola merges your notes with a full transcript automatically. So it kind of weaves them into together into something that's much more structured. and actually useful. There are also lots of use cases. So for example, for someone in the sales role, the ability to turn the transcript. into a sales follow up email that contains all the details.

mentioned during the call that actually drives someone to make a purchase, which could not only save time, but also how to bring so much more business. And the thing that I love most about this is what it gives back to you in the room. You can actually be present now in your conversations on your meeting, which made my meeting so much more enjoyable. And a pro tip here is that you can also connect granola to your everyday. AI assistance like clause in ChatGPT via connector so that at the end. the meeting, the transcript convince your task manager like notion. or a sauna and run up next steps introduce without you having to do it yourself.

And all this is in my free AI playbook, which you can download below. This last two is for those who work with lots of visual images, and that is Google Nano Banana Pro, and this tool will help to cut down your production costs and time. Some of you might be wondering why not Midjourney? I think Midjourney is amazing for those of you who are more technical, but for the majority of people who are watching this video here, Google Up another pro is far more superior for beginners. and easy to get started with, and I use it mainly for content visuals.

that go alongside my videos and my social media posts. I'll be using none other than a pro. for these infographic whiteboard and images on my LinkedIn post, which has been such a great way to visually represent something. There are more technical, like how to use dispatch on cloud towork. As you can see here, it did a great job of mocking this up in 30s, and I think. what makes it different is the precise editing with just plain English. You don't need to learn. a special syntax or spend hours tweaking parameters in technical tools. You could describe what you want and it delivers on that.

And if it's not quite right, you can iterate. back and forth with banana until you get to what you want. You just say remove the background, change the color, make it more minimal, for example, and then it will just then, based on what you say, the result is super photorealistic. And pro tip here is that if you need the image to be 4K in high resolution, you can access the Banana Pro directly through Google AI studio and purchase. additional credits to download your image with the settings that you want. So this is the AI stacked. I will get started with.

If I had to start from zero today, it's not a lot, but that's a point because. you don't need to use everything out there and get overwhelmed. The people who actually get ahead of the AI are not the ones using the most tools, they're the ones who chooses the right ones, learn them really well, go deep on each, and then build a workflow around them. that becomes their personal system that actually save time and scale. on what they do. So my best advice is don't try to do it all. Pick one tool from this list today. The one that solves your most urgent problem right now. Use it for a real task this week, then add the next one,

because that's how you build something. that actually sticks and you'll work over time. If you enjoyed this video, you might also like this one. about how to become a AI native without being technical. I'm Lauri and thank you so much for being here. Don't forget to subscribe for more videos. like these and I'll see you in the next video.