Apps worth opening

P

Perplexity

Perplexity

Answers with the sources attached, which changes what it is good for: fact-finding and follow-ups rather than drafting. The citation habit is the product.

MC

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft

Bundled into the office suite, so the question is not whether it is the best assistant but whether it is already in the licence you pay for. Usually it is.

N

NotebookLM

Google

Answers only from the documents you give it and cites them by name, which makes it the rare AI tool that is more trustworthy the more you load into it.

D

DeepSeek

DeepSeek

Free at the consumer end and unusually cheap at the API end, which is a difficult combination for the paid competitors to answer.

K

Kimi

Moonshot AI

The Chinese consumer assistant most often reached for when the job is a pile of PDFs rather than a conversation.

M

Midjourney

Midjourney

Still the strongest default look in image generation, which is a real trade: you get a house style whether you wanted one or not.

AF

Adobe Firefly

Adobe

Sold on the training data rather than the output, which is the honest pitch: it is the one to pick when legal has to approve the sourcing.

R

Runway

Runway

Video generation with an editing suite around it, which is what makes it usable for actual work rather than for clips that exist only to demo the model.

E

ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs

The voice tool the rest of the industry integrates with, and the one whose output people most often fail to identify as synthetic.

S

Suno

Suno

Whole songs from a text prompt, vocals included. The interesting use is not making music but making a specific piece of music for a specific thirty seconds of video.

D

Descript

Descript

Editing audio and video by editing the transcript, which is the interface idea that makes it stick after the novelty wears off.

O

Otter

Otter.ai

Meeting transcription with speaker labels and a searchable archive. The value is cumulative: one meeting is a note, three hundred is a searchable record.

D

DeepL

DeepL

Translation that reads less like translation, which is the only thing that ever mattered here. Still the one to reach for when the text will be published.

G

Grammarly

Grammarly

Sits inside whatever you are already typing in, which is why it survived the last few years while more ambitious writing tools did not.

NA

Notion AI

Notion

Generates and edits inside a workspace that already holds your notes, so the useful part is the context rather than the model.

H

HeyGen

HeyGen

Talking-head video without a camera, aimed at the training-video and localisation market rather than at creators. The pitch is cost per video, not quality.

P

Poe

Quora

One window with several models behind it, which is mainly useful for the thing most people should do more of: asking the same question twice.