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Here are 10 AI-powered tools to help boost your productivity at work

Sarah Jackson,Aaron Mok   

Here are 10 AI-powered tools to help boost your productivity at work
Tech5 min read

Tome: Building slide decks

If you make a lot of PowerPoints for work, the app Tome can help you do it faster.

It can turn documents into slide decks in seconds, with options to spruce up your presentations by adding 3-D renderings, live content, or even video narrations of your slides.

Fireflies: Taking notes

If you find yourself getting distracted in meetings because you're multi-tasking by jotting down notes, there are plenty of AI-powered note-takers that may be able to help. One such tool is Fireflies AI.

You can invite it to meetings or set it up to automatically join calls on your calendar. This Google Chrome extension works with conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Webex, to record meetings and and transcribe them within minutes. You can then search your transcript to find action items, tasks, and questions; your colleagues can interact with the transcript using comments, pins, and reactions, and meetings notes can be shared to apps like Asana, Slack, and Notion.

Fireflies can also analyze the speech in your meetings to show metrics like how long someone spoke or how many questions they asked.

Remail: Writing emails

No matter your profession or industry, email probably makes up some part of your job.

Managing your inbox can be a pretty tedious time-suck, but tools like Remail might help you get through emails more efficiently.

With this Google extension for Gmail, you specify if you want to send a positive or negative response to an email, and it'll draft a message for you in the style and tone of the conversation. You can also customize a response by summarizing what you want to say in a few words, and Remail will generate a full response based on your input.

Whatever you ask for, you'll get multiple draft options to choose from. Remail's website says its clients include employees from companies like Meta, Google, and Netflix.

Wordtune Read: Summarize text

Reading through lengthy reports can eat up a lot of time. AI readers like Wordtune Read might be able to help you get to the gist faster.

Using this Google Chrome extension, you can upload a PDF or paste a URL, and it'll highlight the most relevant information from the text and give you brief summaries next to each passage.

It works for academic articles, business reports, blog posts, and more.

Numerous.ai: Create spreadsheets

If you work with large data sets in the course of your job, you might have a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets. In that case, a tool like Numerous.ai, which works with Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, might be able to help.

Numerous.ai can quickly extract relevant information from large data sets, and sort and categorize items.

You can describe in your own words what you'd like a formula to accomplish, and Numerous.ai will generate a formula for your spreadsheet. You can also teach it to handle repetitive tasks like cell formatting or certain calculations.

Brain.fm: Staying focused

Focusing on tasks can be tough, especially if you work from home. Brain.fm, an AI-generated music tool, can help users stay on task.

The browser-based web app is designed "to help listeners focus, relax and sleep," according to the company.

The tool offers a range of music options — from atmospheric to electronic — that are designed by a team of scientists and composers to help users enter a state of "deep work," or uninterrupted focus.

Insider's Aaron Mok tried the tool for a week and found it gave him a boost of motivation to start rote tasks like responding to emails. It also helped him quickly transition into a focused state of mind.

Grammarly: Boosting writing quality

Jobs across all industries can require some form of writing. Grammarly, an AI-writing assistant, can help workers catch mistakes in their copy.

Used by more than 30 million people and 50,000 teams globally, the browser extension makes suggestions about word choice and sentence structure, checks for plagiarism, generates citations, and reviews essays. It can also assess the tone of your writing. That way, e-mails, press releases, and internal memos can be written with a second pair of eyes.

"It's great at automatically catching errors and typos," Deb Lee, a consultant who works with entrepreneurs and small business owners to boost their productivity, previously told Insider.

ContactOut: Searching for contact information

Finding contact information for prospective clients may be time consuming. ContactOut can reduce the amount of time spent doing just that.

The Google Chrome browser extension — used by 1.4 million people — scrapes the internet to find active e-mails and phone numbers for professionals on Linkedin Standard, Sales Navigator, and Recruiter. It can also create a list of contacts and make a personalized email campaign out of it. The combination of these features can accelerate the process of landing new customers.

Meanwhile, ContactOut can integrate with customer relationship management software like Salesforce and Hubspot.

Recruiters and sales representatives at Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Google, and PwC use the tool, according to the company.

Todoist: Making to-do lists

Writing to-do lists using pen and paper may not be for tech-savvy workers. Todoist, a plug-in tool, could provide a better alternative.

The Google Chrome browser extension is used by more than 800,000 users to plan their days and complete tasks. Users can add different websites to their task list — like a blog post to finish reading, or an item you want on your wish list. That way, users can add or finish tasks in a single place, which can eliminate disruptions to their workflow when switching between platforms.

Todoist's desktop and mobile app includes additional features, such as collaborative to-do lists, progress tracking, and reminder notifications. It can be integrated into more than 60 desktop and mobile apps including Google Drive, Slack, and Dropbox.

BlockSite: Blocking websites to eliminate distractions

Workers may be tempted to scroll through social media or read news articles during work hours. If that applies to you, the BlockSite plug-in could be a potential solution.

Downloaded by over 1 million users, BlockSite is a Google Chrome extension workers can use to block distracting sites for a select period of time. That way, users can stay focused on their pressing tasks.

Those tempted to find workarounds can lock the sites with a password to make them harder to access.

The browser extension also includes focus mode, a feature that allocates a certain amount of time to a particular task, as well as data insights that show how much time a user spends on a website.


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