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There’s an AI tool for everything, but only a few are must-haves for everyone.
And I’m not talking about those AI tools that are great for a specific field (coding, writing, etc), but those tools that you might regret not using now because they can help you learn faster and become more productive no matter what your job is.
Here’s the top 4 AI tools I believe everyone should use.
1. Google AI Studio: Your real-time AI tutor
Google AI Studio is an all-in-one platform to experiment with Google’s latest Gemini AI models. It offers text, image, audio, and even video generation in one place.
What makes Google AI Studio stand out is its real-time screen sharing feature. This feature allows us to share our screens, enabling us to analyze on-screen content and provide real-time assistance.
Anyone with a Google account can use this feature for free. Here’s how to start working with it:
Once you grant permission to share your screen and microphone, you can start talking to it in real time.
In a previous article, I showed how this feature can speed up your Python learning—but Google AI Studio is just as useful for exploring, troubleshooting, or streamlining any program or task on your computer.
For example, the other day, it guided me on how to use Photoshop to edit an image generated with ChatGPT.
If you’re a Photoshop expert, you probably have better ways to edit this image. That said, Google AI Studio still offers useful solutions for beginners.
To sum it up, anyone who needs real-time assistance on their computer should use Google AI Studio.
2. NotebookLM: Your honest assistant for digesting information
If your work involves reading and synthesizing lots of information, Google’s NotebookLM can be a game-changer. NotebookLM is like an AI research tool that is grounded in your own documents. You can upload PDFs, Google Docs, or even YouTube transcripts into NotebookLM, and it’ll generate summaries, answer questions with citations, FAQs, and even podcasts.
In the demo below, I use NotebookLM to generate a summary of a YouTube video.
Instead of manually skimming large reports, notes, or papers, you can ask NotebookLM to highlight key points or explain a section, and it will respond with references to the exact source document.
I used NotebookLM to generate a summary of this paper. After a few minutes, it generated a summary, along with follow-up questions you could ask.
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On the right panel, you’ll find additional options such as generating a study guide, an FAQ, and (my favorite) a podcast. I love podcasts because you can listen to summaries on the go.
Here’s the podcast it generated for the paper.
 Listen now · 25:45 |
Something great about NotebookLM is that it sticks to the provided sources, so you’re less likely to get wild AI hallucinations. That said, it won’t answer questions beyond those materials. Unlike a general chatbot, it won’t pull new info from the web unless you import it.