Three AI Tools I Can’t LIve Without

Living on my browser and on my phone are AI tools that I find essential to my day to day life because they make work as well as fun easier.

Sider, Perplexity, and Gemini advanced are like having a team of brilliant assistants at your fingertips. They provide instant answers, generate creative content, and streamline tasks.

1. Sider. This is a Chrome Extension you’ll find in the Chrome store. Once installed, you can summon it up by clicking on the purple brain icon on the extension bar on the right upper corner of your Chrome browser. Once you do that, a side panel will open up on the right side of the window you are browsing. Alternatively, you’ll find a small brain icon floating on the right most side of every input field you mouse-over.

   With sider, you can choose from a number of AI models (Chatgpt 4o, Chatgpt 3.5, Claude, etc.). You can ask Sider questions, write, translate, and search. It can also read webpages for you, check your grammar, summarize a PDF, or summarize a long video (as long as it has closed captions).I use it a lot whenever I am rushing through a pile of email with huge attachments. Great thing about it is, it not only gives you key points but you can also ask it questions about the lengthy documents.Another way I use it is to summarize long videos  — which have closed captions.

   Of course, you can also ask it to write responses to email as well as messages. It can even answer questions about stuff that just slips your mind, and even improve your writing on the fly.

2. Perplexity. You’ll find this AI tool here, on Apple’s App Store or Google’s Playstore. This is what I use when I am writing something that needs to be backed up by authoritative sources or needs citations. It’s also great for sounding out ideas because it draws on carefully selected sources. This is better than letting it just cull from the data it was trained on. In fact, you can specify that it draw only on just academic/published papers, Reddit, or Wolfram using its Focus function.
3. Gemini Advanced. This AI Tool comes with Google Workspace.  The great thing about it is that it works across all of Google’s Workspace products. One way I use it is to find emails or documents in my Google drive without having to pore through each document. It also works with Google docs, sheets, and slides.

Of course, these AI tools can be used for so much more.

I’ve seen people use it to create code for games, write python programs to automate content creation from research to final output, and even write out entire novels.

And these are AI uses that I’m only beginning to explore!