I could write a cliche hook about how AI has changed the world and revolutionised every field you could imagine but at this point, it’s been overdone.
I’ve made use of some very powerful AI tools, and although none of them have been ‘life-changing’, they’ve helped streamline the work that I’m doing on a day-to-day basis, so I’m going to cover them in this article.
Only a few of the tools that I’ve tried have stuck around by holding a genuine benefit to my work and productivity, so this list is going to be quite simple.
Note: most of the tools that I’m going to list here require an OpenAI API key. This is not free, although the cost of purchasing and using one is very little, especially when you use a cheaper AI model.
Let’s get started…
Obsidian QuickAdd
This Obsidian plugin is the best AI tool that I’ve used this year, by a very long way. It’s completely customisable with different scripts that you can build and write prompts for in a folder in your vault.
I use the plugin for generating flashcards from my university work at the moment, but in the past, I’ve built a lot of different AI scripts for running different things through this plugin, including an AI writing team that generates realistic articles.
I’ve written extensively about this plugin in my other articles, so you can check them out to see more of what this plugin is capable of…
Obsidian ChatGPT MD
The other primary AI plugin that I’ve been using in Obsidian is a little less complex, but still very effective. This one manages conversations with AI in markdown note format in your vault. It’s like having ChatGPT but in Obsidian, stored offline in Markdown files instead.
You can integrate this with the QuickAdd plugin, allowing you to create a macro that can be used to query AI from anywhere in your vault.
I used this when I was revising for university exams so that I had lightning-quick access to the information that covered the gaps in my knowledge when my notes weren’t sufficient information.
Readwise Reader
The internet is full of fantastic content, and Readwise Reader is a great way of organising and accessing this content in an easy-to-use interface that allows you to highlight and manage all your resources.
As well as this, it’s recently introduced an integration with OpenAI for its ghost-reader features, where you can now get GPT-generated summaries of the sources that you’ve saved, so you can get the gist of what they’re about before you even start reading.
This can be useful when you’re researching in bulk — you can scan through summaries rather than whole articles to see whether the piece is going to provide you with enough valuable information for it to be worth opening and reading in-depth.
Midjourney
I’ve always been one to put a relevant image at the top of the pieces of writing that I produce, because of how it can serve as an effective thumbnail that draws people in to read my work.
For this, I’ve been using the AI tool Midjourney, which is far and away the best AI image generator that I’ve tried. At $10/month, it’s quite expensive, but I consider it quite valuable because of how much content I write.
Using Midjourney means that I can invent and customise graphics and images that I can use for my brand and articles. This makes the work seem a little more aesthetic and professional than if there wasn’t any kind of visual element to the work.
Google Bard
Seeing as ChatGPT doesn’t have real-time access to the internet, I can only give you information on evergreen content and concepts. Bard is great at giving you the most up-to-date knowledge in a certain area.
For example, I bought a new MacBook yesterday, so I could further my personal brand and creative projects. I’ve come from Windows, so I don’t have a clue how any of the settings work. This means that I have to spend some time learning, so I use Bard to give me information on the settings when I need it.
I’ve simply been using Bard as a more effective search engine because we know how frustrating it can be when we require a specific answer that just doesn’t seem to be coming up in search results. It’s much easier to put a larger, more complicated prompt into Bard and return something that makes sense, and that you can put into action.
Honourable Mentions
There are a few more tools that I’ve used on some occasions that I thought I might mention here as well:
- ChatPDF — this website is simple, but very well executed. You upload a PDF that contains information that’s of interest to you, and you can use the interface on the website to ask questions about that PDF. I used this when I was revising directed reading for university exams, so I could verify that the content on my flashcards matched what was being shown in the experiments on the PDFs I was interrogating.
- ChatGPT — a giant in the world of AI tools, this is what I used before I’d put together workflows for using AI in Obsidian’s QuickAdd. It allowed me to generate code for graphs in lab reports, as well as plan and outline some of my original articles.
So here are the tools that I’ve been using since AI exploded onto the scene. As I said at the start of the article, they aren’t life-changing, but they should go a long way towards optimising and improving your workflows in the future. Keep a lookout for more AI content from me too, because this kind of thing has been developing really quickly since blowing up, so there are new tools coming out every day.
I hope you learned something new that you can put into action, thanks for reading!