My Favourite AI Tools
Small disclaimer: I have to admit I am not a huge AI tool user. Why? Simply put; I haven’t been blown away by many AI first products and I tend to take as long tweaking and editing to make something I would want to put my name to. Most of the time I have to use the jobs-to-be-done framework to work out what the AI tool purpose is and then have to fit my need.
With that said here are my favourite tools
Perplexity - I use it for quick answers, it is quick and acts like an answer engine (not a search engine - it isn’t a new Google) and offers sources from their answers
Bing Image Creator - I use it to create quick and easy images for this blog and presentations. It is a simple and free creator (not exactly perfect images but good for blogs or social content)
Descript - I use it for editing podcasts, it automates and transcribes my podcasts (audio and or video) and then you can create clips to share on social media. If you can create in a Google doc, you can create and edit video and audio in descript.
Notion AI Q&A - I use it to find and ask questions about the documents and databases in my notion. It saves me a lot of time and works better than the standard search does. As a Product person, I appreciate the care and effort taken in this product.
Lex.page - I use it to build out ideas and articles or to question myself on the content. It’s perfect for simple editing and it is like writing in Google docs with inbuilt actions to take with quick prompts to help move you forward.
Claude - I use this as a creative assistant. I find it better for answers than ChatGPT. I have found you don’t need the most detailed prompts for Claude to produce high-quality answers and their artefacts really do help create a better search for better results. It’s a product that puts the consumer at the front vs other creative AI tools.
Bearly.ai - I use bearly as a creative assistant and alongside it being research assistant, as you can select the AI model when you query you can ask it varying questions or question on other AI models (say ChatGPT 4o and then Haiku) to validate or expand out. I don’t use Bearly as much as I should… Something that many people love using it for is transcription (audio and YouTube videos)
Other decent AI products include Grammarly, Canva and ChatGPT 4o.
Google’s AI Ad Problem
Google’s Issue Is It Put Product Ahead Of Their Audience In A Tasteless Way
You know an ad has caused controversy when the brand turns off comments on their YouTube upload… and then Thursday (1st August) night pulls the ad completely.
Dear Sydney (ad below) is one of those ads that has blown up and not in a good blown up way.
A simple ad suggesting how to use their new Gemini AI product has highlighted several issues with how the general public is reacting to AI and how it will influence parenting in the future.
What Google has failed to see is much fear around AI and its potential impact, especially on parents’ hands on / hands off approach to tech and how many fear lazy parenting and over reliance on tech will impact us all.
Google has forced their AI tech into a sporting event without thinking of the second and third-order effects of the ads.
In some respects, Google has done exactly what an ad is supposed to do, create conversation, on the other hand it has been tone deaf to how people are viewing AI.
Did It Miss The Mark Or Was For The Wrong Ad Audience? Google’s media quote is quite telling: "We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it," I feel for Google ad communications manager Alana Beale who had to respond to media requests on an ad that missed the mark. Being in-house and responding to advertising campaign concerns or issues is not an enjoyable place or position to be in.
Gemini Gone Too Far? If Google Gemini had just helped the father tweak the say ‘sorry-not-sorry’ line for breaking Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s record that would have landed much better, unfortunately, this shows this ad might just be for investors and shareholders over consumers.
Keep an eye out for the next series of AI apps and chatbot ads, as the feedback, commentary and kickback will be telling in how AI tools might have to be advertised and targeted moving forward.
>> If you liked this post, read about Google’s AI battle. And how Apple’s approach to AI is likely going to win them the long-term AI battle.
Google’s Next Battle - AI, Gemini & Customer Happiness
Google’s Secret → Habitual Product, Slow AI Timing & Narrative Builds.
In Tuesday’s quarterly earnings call Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said:
“Gemini is making Google's own products better. All 6 of our products with more than 2B monthly users now use Gemini. This means that Google is the company that's truly bringing AI to everyone”.
This was a smart comms line.
This statement was made for shareholders and investors to buy into their AI push and ignore the stories coming out of the internal team cultural battles and reduce the friction around Google’s less flashy approach to AI and right now a slight let-down in terms of features and improvements for paying customers.
What Google is doing well is pushing the narrative that their AI product is the first to be in consumers’ and corporate customer’s lives to send a shot across the bow to Apple (who were the first to embed this from their recent event with their Apple AI partnership approach). Android vs iOS is going to be a long battle especially in the next device to replace smartphones and in AI space, which might blend into one…
Google Wins Are Potentially Google’s Next Big Issue:
What many tend to miss is the incredible results (Alphabet reported $84.7bn in revenue with $24 Billion quarterly profit, from an incredibly strong Search (ads business) and Cloud revenues) Google and competitors can win have arguably declining products: Google’s example is their organic search product (their SERPs are an absolute mess right now) and increasing Google Workspace & Google Cloud pricing for no extra customer benefits, while benefiting from increased ad pricing and ad placements.
Battle 1 Alphabet’s share price dropped Wednesday reacting to the market news and slow adoption in AI, one major concern is failed cloud acquisitions in HubSpot and now Wiz.
But Time Is On Their Side: Google, Apple and Amazon’s secret is almost always timing, especially with AI and not rushing into AI - this is going to win the mass market for them while others rush, crash and burn.
Battle 2 Google’s Ask Fatigue & Friction: Google’s asks from customers will lead to ask fatigue and churn, asks will continue to increase, Google will continue to ask for more budget from advertisers with different targeting (soon to be less opaque) options, more company to upgrade users to Gemini AI and ask consumers to pay for more storage for Gmail use.
If you have ever worked inside of a big company or a listed company you have core workstreams (projects that take company-wide priority) and internal politically driven decisions that to the outside don’t make much sense. If your workstream (say organic search or improving Google Workspace features) doesn’t make the OKR sign off it won’t have any resource assigned or budget for quarters ahead.
Google’s next battle is how to improve their search results (away from optimising the number of ads) while facing competition from answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity and cramming in more ads at increasing prices to keep investors happy.
Here’s a good graphic via Reddit for Alphabet’s results last quarter - take a look at traffic acquisition costs $13.8b — paying for defaults on iPhones and Samsung devices is not cheap.
>> Are you a heavy Google Workspace user? Here are my favourite Google Workspace shortcuts and hacks to improve your productivity
Manners Cost Nothing With AI
Manners Will Always Cost Nothing - Maybe Working With Manners With AI Will Reward You
Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of the Atlantic, he is the best example of a CEO sharing regular and useful content on LinkedIn, he shared recently that politeness to AI renders better, longer results for you.
As he points out from a research paper there are cultural differences (Japanese culture is respectful and polite whereas English and Chinese are more direct) but being polite renders better longer results as it is trained on internet content and as humans we are taught manners and politeness matters.
In the future, it will be fascinating to see how this evolves and whether the bias of the code and training data is respected or ignored.
Remember manners cost nothing and might just be critical in the age or wave of AI.