112 | These Are A Few of My Favorite AI Apps...

Before you read on … could you lend me a hand by taking this quick poll?

Introduction

This poll leads to the topic of my upcoming articles, namely the AI apps that I’ve come to use most often. In each article, I’ll give a brief overview of the app, what I find it to be most adept at providing, and some examples of how it’s useful to me and might be useful to you.

As a preview, here’s my go-to list of AI apps (circa fall 2024).

ChatGPT on the computer

My #1 go-to app for brainstorming, broadening knowledge, deepening understanding, learning Polish, and lots, lots more
As the most prominent generative AI application, ChatGPT claims a lot of attention. It was in fall 2022 that an incredible “once-in-a-generation-or-so” technological leap, accompanied by previously unheard-of global investments and political attention, was heralded.

I’ve written numerous times about ChatGPT¹, largely through a favorable lens—its capabilities continue to push the envelope of what AI can do, both through its underlying models and more recently with its consumer-friendly advances in user experience. I’ll tell you more about the features and capabilities that I find most compelling.

ChatGPT on my phone

Partner to ChatGPT on the computer, I’m using it on the phone more and more, particularly with the Advanced Voice option

While ChatGPT has stiff competition on the computer, I haven’t found any other general-purpose AI app that comes close to what the ChatGPT phone app provides. Granted, I’m using it on an Apple iPhone, so I may be missing out on some capabilities that Google provides to its Android community. I’ll fill you in on the latest capabilities of the ChatGPT phone app (which also is available for Android), and I’ll be very interested to hear what you’re doing with your phones these days!

Claude

My ghost writer and editor

The leaderboard for second place in the general-purpose AI chatbot apps had been a revolving door in the first year or so following ChatGPT’s initial release. But since its release in June, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 family has been neck-and-neck with ChatGPT for claiming the gold standard. I use it primarily as a writing assistant, but I’ll describe more about its strengths and shortcomings for other purposes as well.

Perplexity

My home for big-topic exploration

Perplexity came on the scene over a year ago and has gained a lot of attention (both good and bad) and use. It clearly opened eyes to a new paradigm for AI as an “answer engine” (in contrast to Google as a “search engine”). My use of Perplexity has been spotty, but always favorable. I’ll characterize its strengths and position versus general-purpose tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, as well as contrast with my final favorite app (NotebookLM) and what’s known about OpenAI’s upcoming release of SearchGPT.

NotebookLM

My new favorite place to conduct Q&A about complex information

Finally, I’ll write the article I’ve been impatient to get to over the last few months—a profile of Google’s experimental tool, NotebookLM. I first learned about it in the spring and found it to be compelling for certain use cases, particularly where I want to explore large documents or sets of information in an AI conversational way, but without hallucinations. NotebookLM is the best tool by far at providing this, and it’s free and easy to use (bonus!).

Very recently, NotebookLM has gained a lot of media attention, especially because of its podcast-style audio summaries. At first, I found them to be little more than a gimmick (though I was wowed by the human-like quality of the voices), but this week Google added the capability to ‘coach’ the podcast creation, which moves this feature towards something much more useful to me. I’ll tell you more!

Final Words

These choices are clearly a small subset of the thousands of AI apps available these days, and they’re focused on my fairly simple use of AI. In the overarching theme of StrefaTECH, I’ll be sure to highlight possibilities for applying these in the nonprofit world. And I’ll hope that some of you will be inspired to tell me more about your experiences! As always, it’s strefatech.info@gmail.com.

And as you’re pondering whether and when to turn to your favorite AI apps for help, be sure to pause if you’re sharing any sensitive information. In short…

Make Good Choices!

1. Search StrefaTECH for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to read my prior articles!