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6 AI Tools I Use Every Day

2023-03-26 · Tech review, setup or bag tour · Ali · recording, 15:53 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Tools, apps and tech · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: AI, Sponsor segment present

Ali walks through the six AI tools he uses every day (ChatGPT, Notion AI, Speechify, Lex, Grain and Otter.ai): AI is good for generating ideas, outlines, summaries and transcripts, but it makes up studies, so he checks and does the thinking himself.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Intro: the six AI tools Ali uses every day

00:00:24 — ChatGPT for research and idea generation, and its limits

  • ★★ ChatGPT is the AI chatbot made by OpenAI, which Ali calls the leading force in AI over recent months for releasing GPT-3, GPT-3.5 (ChatGPT) and, very recently, GPT-4. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Ali's main personal use of ChatGPT is idea generation: for a chapter of his book he asked it for scientific case studies linking play, dopamine, novelty and productivity. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Ali says ChatGPT's limitation is that the language model just predicts the next word, so it often makes leaps of logic or says things that are not true. — 00:02:46
  • ★★ When ChatGPT's answers miss, Ali narrows the prompt: asking for real-world examples of adding novelty to mundane work tasks, excluding gamification, gave him ideas such as walking meetings to explore. — 00:03:15
  • ★ Ali knows Bruce Daisley discusses walking meetings in The Joy of Work and plans to research himself whether studies show walking meetings make people more creative and productive. — 00:03:44
  • ★★ ChatGPT is often at capacity; Ali pays for ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month, which he finds totally worth it because he uses it a lot for research. — 00:03:44
  • ★★ Ali has talked about Notion since about 2019; his company keeps much of its documentation in it, and for four years it has been the hub for his YouTube videos. (hedged) — 00:04:14 · Notion

00:04:19 — Notion AI: outlines, summaries and tables from his Kindle highlights

  • ★★★ Notion AI wrote Ali a seven-tip outline citing studies with DOIs in about two minutes, but when he googled the DOIs none of the studies turned out to be real, so he still has to do the research himself. — 00:05:47 · Notion
  • ★★ Through the Readwise integration with Notion, everything Ali has ever highlighted on his Kindle is imported automatically into his Notion database. — 00:06:16 · Readwise, Notion, Kindle
  • ★★ Ali is working on a Book Club episode on The Pathless Path by his friend Paul Millerd, and uses Notion AI to outline it from his highlights of the book. — 00:06:16 · Book Club, Notion
  • ★★★ Ali has AI work from the passages he personally highlighted: adding that human touch and letting the AI augment it hopefully gives better results than asking the AI alone. (hedged) — 00:07:15
  • ★★ Ali does not copy AI-generated action points from a book into a tweet thread, as they are too basic; he looks through them for the interesting ones to expand on. — 00:07:44
  • ★★ Ali lets AI do the grunt work of outlining to give his own brain ideas, but for his videos he still draws his own spider diagrams, whether or not AI helped. — 00:08:42

00:08:57 — Notion AI sponsor link

  • ★★ The AI text-to-speech app Speechify was first built for people with dyslexia, but many people without dyslexia find it boosts their productivity in reading. — 00:09:12

00:09:20 — Speechify: text to speech for reading papers at speed

  • ★★ Ali reads fast himself, but when his attention wanders over papers he turns on Speechify to read them to him, which makes reading a bit more fun. — 00:09:41
  • ★★★ To skim a long PDF he is not very interested in, Ali has Speechify read it at about 900 words per minute, then reads the interesting part properly and takes notes. — 00:10:48
  • ★★ Ali has used the writing tool Lex since 19 October 2022 and still enjoys it as basically Google Docs with AI built in, in a distraction-free writing environment. — 00:10:48

00:11:16 — Lex: AI autocomplete against writer's block

  • ★★ Lex's autocomplete takes Ali's writing style into account: it learns from what he has already written and continues in that style. — 00:12:00
  • ★★★ When Ali does not know what to write next, he has Lex's AI fill it in; he usually deletes it and writes his own, but it gets him past writer's block and gives ideas. — 00:12:29
  • ★ Notion AI did not exist when Ali started using Lex, and he says you can probably do the same things in Notion AI. (hedged) — 00:12:29 · Notion
  • ★★ Grain automatically imports recorded Zoom calls, makes an AI transcript if wanted and now also an AI summary of each call. — 00:12:59 · Zoom
  • ★ Ali has recorded basically all his Zoom calls in Grain since June 2020. — 00:12:59 · Zoom

00:13:00 — Grain: recording, transcripts and summaries of Zoom calls

  • ★★ Grain is particularly helpful for meetings: Ali's team shares the recordings, summaries and highlights with people who were not at the meeting. — 00:13:28
  • ★★★ Ali started using Grain three years ago, when he began his book, to document the whole journey of writing it, including calls with his editor and with James Clear. — 00:13:28 · James Clear
  • ★★ Ali says that at some point he will go through the recorded calls about his book and turn them into a personal documentary on how the book's journey went. — 00:13:57

00:14:22 — Otter.ai: podcast transcripts and voice notes from audiobooks

  • ★★ Transcribing the team's podcasts with Otter.ai massively boosted its productivity: they upload the MP3, and podcast producer Amber picks clips for social media from the transcripts. — 00:14:26 · Deep Dive
  • ★★★ Ali takes notes from audiobooks by speaking his thoughts into Otter.ai on the go, which transcribes them in real time, as he did for Amy Porterfield's Two Weeks Notice. — 00:14:26 · Notion

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: ChatGPT · Grain · Lex · Notion AI · Otter.ai · Speechify

Also: People: Amber · Amy Porterfield · Bruce Daisley · Cliff Weitzman · Inez · James Clear · Paul Millerd · Rachel (editor, mentioned from 2022)

Projects: Book Club · Deep Dive · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: The Joy of Work · The Pathless Path · Two Weeks Notice

Organizations: OpenAI

Concepts: default path · speed listening

Products: Google Docs · GPT-4 · Kindle · Notion · Readwise · Zoom

Also centred on Speechify: One Simple Habit that Changed My Life

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