The AI Tools I Actually Use Every Day

All right, I'm just going to get straight to it. These are the AI tools that I use myself on a daily basis. It's the most common question I get asked, so I figured I'd make a video and break it all down for you.

Now, these are kind of sort of in the order I use them from most to least. And I've got to start with Perplexity cuz it's the one that I definitely use the most. Now, I am on the Perplexity Pro plan myself, but I don't think it's necessary. I think you'll find Perplexity just as useful if you're not on the pro plan. But for me, this has essentially become a replacement to Google. I just ask anything to it. In fact, if I go and look in my history here, I'm using it constantly. I'm recording this kind of early in the day, so I haven't used it a ton today, but I was getting advice on how to dial in my camera a little bit better 7 minutes before recording this video. Yesterday, I was trying to figure out how I can listen to a basketball game on the radio. I was also asking it questions about Opus 4.6 six and comparing it to Claude Sonnet 4.6 which came out yesterday and you can just see I'm using it constantly. This is definitely the most used tool again. It's kind of become a replacement for Google search for me.

Another big reason that I do use Perplexity so often is that I am actually using the Comet browser quite a bit. Now Comet has sponsored my channel in the past. They're not currently a sponsor, but I started using this browser and it did everything Chrome did, but also had Perplexity built in. So, when I do have a random question, I usually don't actually go to the Perplexity homepage and type it in. I'm usually using the browser here. And I'll just ask my question up here where you'd normally type a URL. Like, what is the best YouTube channel to keep up with AI news? And of course, it gives some pretty solid responses.

Now, another thing that I do like about the Comet browser is that I like to use the assistant up here quite a bit as well. So, let's say I'm reading this article here about the Ring camera. I pretty often open my assistant here and I've created a series of slash commands. So if I type slash, you can see I've created some shortcuts. One of them is newsreview. And if I just click this news review shortcut that I've already created. I don't have to type any prompt at all. I click that, hit submit, and you can see it fills in a prompt that I've already pre-written. Break this article down for me. Is there anything newsworthy that the general public might care about? What are the implications of this news, if any, on nontechnical consumers? and then it gives me my response here which I will often read through. That's one of the ways I use a slash command. Another slash command that I like to use is one that I made for my YouTube channel. So if I click on assistant, type my slash, I've got one called comment review. And this actually looks through the comments on my YouTube video to give me helpful feedback. It sort of ignores the troll like comments and mean-spirited comments and finds the actual valuable feedback for me. And I just pre-created a prompt that I just type the slash, find the exact prompt I want to use, and it gives me a nice response with actual helpful feedback about how I can improve future videos. For me, that's my main favorite benefit about using the comment browser. I know in Chrome, you can actually use Gemini now, and it works fine, but it doesn't have those slash commands. It doesn't have a bunch of pre-written prompts that I already created where I could just get to them really quick by typing a slash.

I also find it really helpful that they have all of these models here that I can use. Now, off the top of my head, I don't actually know which ones are only available on the pro plan and which ones are on the free plan. But because I am on the pro plan, I can choose any one of these models. I can use Gemini or GPT or Claude 4.6 or Grock 4.1 or Kimmy K2.5. I usually just leave it on best, but if I want a different response to see how a different model would handle the exact same prompt, I can easily switch right here. So, that's also really cool.

Now, I know Perplexity has a bunch of other features like finance and spaces and all of this kind of stuff here, but this is about what I actually use. And to be totally honest, I don't personally use a lot of that other stuff inside of Perplexity. I just mostly ask it questions that it can go and do quick search research on for me. And I use the assistant in Comet quite a bit with my slash commands. It also has agent features where it will take control of the browser and do things for you. But even though I think it's really cool that we can do that, I find myself not using it very often myself still because it's just faster to do a lot of the things myself.

Now, when it comes to the actual chatbot that I use and sort of brainstorm with and work on like rough draft for videos with and try to think of title ideas with and stuff like that, my go-to is claude.ai. I am on the max plan, but mostly because I also use it for coding as well, which I'll get to later in this video. But I rarely find myself using chat GPT anymore. I just find that Claude tends to give me answers that I appreciate more. It's a lot less likely to say things like, "That's an excellent question. You're on the right track." And the whole sick of fancy thing that chat GPT tends to do. I find Claw does it a little bit less. It still does it, but it does it a little bit less. And I also find that it tells me what I need to hear a little bit more than chat GPT where I feel like chat GPT often tells me what I want to hear versus what actually needs to be said to me. I don't know. I guess it's a personal taste thing. I just dig Claude a lot more lately than I do chat GPT.

And when I do use Claude, I use the heck out of projects. I have a project I call my YouTube producer, which helps with video ideas, video titles, video thumbnail ideas, outlines, and everything in between. I have a journal where I literally use it as a journal and just free form toss my thoughts in there and get the feedback. Now, I also built a journal app and I usually write inside of my journal app, but then I copy and paste my journals from there into Claude all the time and then have conversations back and forth with what it thinks about my journal entry. I also have this one called article cleanup. When I do my weekly AI news roundup videos, in the description, I link to every single resource that I mention in the video. Well, this article cleanup, that's actually the project that I created to do that. I have a project called Help Me Explain News. I'll copy and paste a news article in there and it will help me explain it. Although, since I've started using Comet, I find I almost never use this project anymore. I find the YouTube producer and the journal projects are the ones I tend to use the most. I'm not going to show you my journal project because, well, there's some personal stuff in there, but I will show you this YouTube producer project.

What's cool about this is I fed it a bunch of CSV files. These are actually the data from the back end of my YouTube dashboard. So I went into YouTube, grabbed all my analytics, exported it as CSV files, and then uploaded it here. So my YouTube producer project knows exactly which video titles drove the most views, drove the most subscribers, drove the most likes. It knows what platforms people are watching on between TV, desktop, and mobile. It knows what countries people are watching in the most. I fed it all of that data into the file section so it can actually use that information to inform its advice back to me when I'm trying to figure out my YouTube videos. I also have very detailed instructions that explain what my channel is and what I want the videos to be like. I'm not going to get into too much depth in that one, but there is quite a bit of detailed instructions and there's also a memory which is basically built out from these various conversations that I have with my AI YouTube producer. So over time, as I have more and more conversations, it starts to understand more and more of what my channel's all about, what videos I like making, don't like making, what performs, what doesn't perform, between the memory, the instructions, and the files. It kind of knows everything about my YouTube channel. Heck, even before I started recording this video, I had a quick conversation about this video. Now, I already knew what tools I was going to talk about, but it helped me with the angling and titling and all of that kind of stuff.

All right, I feel like I've shared the obvious ones now. Perplexity and Claude. I mean, everybody kind of knows about those. You're probably already using at least one of those already. But again, these are kind of in the order of the ones I use the most to the ones that I use a little less frequently, but still use very often. So, I'm going to dive even deeper.

With all the recent drama about AI social media sites and people using AI to troll on the internet, I've been thinking a lot about what AI was actually meant to be used for, which is increasing productivity and letting AI handle the grunt work. So, I want to show you this tool that I've used a ton before back when I was making marketing videos. It's called Optimizely, and it's a fullscale marketing OS that has AI baked right into the workflow. They have this new AI agent called Opel, and it's already being used by some of the world's biggest companies. And the reason that it's different from other marketing tools is because it has direct access to Google Analytics. So, Opel can actually grab your real performance data to help you make decisions and even perform actions for you. It connects right into your CMS, so you can generate content and easily set up AB tests. And then over here, they have a whole agent directory page with templates for setting up literally everything from optimizing for GEO or generative engine optimization to autogenerating QR codes. I really like how your brand's tone of voice, personas, and training instructions can be input and Optimizely will remember those brand guidelines, so your output is always consistent. It just feels very optimized for marketers. If you're still trying to figure out where AI fits into your marketing stack, Optimizely is even offering a free personalized 45minute AI workshop where they'll help you map out what can be automated with agents and figure out if Opal is the right fit for your team. Plus, they're giving away a pair of Ray-Ban meta glasses if you attend live. And I might even show up myself just to try to snag another pair. So, if you want AI to handle the stuff AI is well supposed to handle, check out Optimizely Opal in the link in the description. And thank you so much to Optimizely for sponsoring this portion of today's video.

Now, let's get back to it. All right, so next up is Whisper Flow. This is one I actually use really often, but almost forgot to mention because it just sort of falls into the background. I don't really think about it. In fact, let me show you my full screen here. You can see up in the top, it just runs up here. It's always running. And now what Whisper Flow actually does is it allows me to press two buttons on my keyboard. On my Mac, it's actually control plus option. And whenever I press that, it just listens to my voice and whatever I speak, it types for me. Now, I know this kind of stuff is built into the Mac, but this actually fixes my speaking, too. It has a model behind the scenes that cleans it up. So, it clears out any sort of ums and anytime I repeat myself, things like that, it just cleans it up. And then the text that it outputs is the cleaned up version. All right. So if I click into my little URL tab up here and I hold down control and option, you'll see these little dots down here and this little waveform is happening that is showing that I am talking right now. And um I I I am going to repeat myself a little bit and uh say uh a couple things like this. And let's see what the final output looks like. You can see it put the final output in here. And you can see it's a cleaned up version of it. It doesn't have the multiple I's. It doesn't have the h and the ums and the things like that. It's just the cleaned up version of what I said instead of a literal translation of what I said. I love using this when I'm actually prompting a lot of the large language models. And I use it a lot when I'm in cursor getting code written for me.

Which brings me to the next tool I want to talk about, which is cursor. I pretty much always have Cursor open cuz I'm constantly working on little apps and websites and just tons of stuff. I built the mattwolf.com site in Cursor. I built this journaling app using Cursor. I'm working on a new version of future tools in Cursor, which I think this is the first time I've ever given this sneak peek, but it's going to be pretty cool where you can see all of the latest news and then if you hover over the news, it will actually give you like a TLDDR of the news. It's still going to have the same tools database, just a little bit different of a design, but still all the same functionality. And that's coming pretty soon, all completely built out using cursor.

But that's not all I use cursor for. I also tend to use cursor quite a bit to build little tools that solve problems for me. So, for example, I built this little dashboard here that I call my command center. It keeps track of my audience, like my total reach, YouTube, newsletter, Twitter. I could see the audience growth over time, weekly change in the audience. It's got all the various social media platforms that I'm on with a quick glance at how it's growing. I could see the week-over-week growth. It pulls in data from my website, so I can see how many visitors my various websites are getting. Up here, it's got details on my newsletter, revenue growth. I have a little mini CRM in here where I keep details about the various companies that I work with and the contacts at those companies. I'm not going to get into some of these other stats because it's, you know, private, but I built this command center so I have a single source to keep my finger on the pulse of my entire business. And well, I used cursor to build all of that.

I also built this tool that I call my thumbnail generator, which is pretty obvious what it does. I basically fed it a ton of different head shot here, as well as a bunch of previous thumbnails that I really liked, and it actually figured out like a style guide for these thumbnails. And then I go through this step-by-step process and it generates thumbnails for me. Now, it's not very good yet, but usually I could get to something that I'm happy with by prompting it a few times until I get some thumbnails that I like. Sometimes it just goes really off the rails, though. I also created a video titler app where I can feed it a full MP4 video and it transcribes the whole video and then suggests a bunch of titles for me for that video. Also built that in cursor. So, when I'm talking about the AI tools that I use constantly, well, I'm constantly building stuff with cursor and then using the tools that I built with cursor on a daily basis.

And as a little side tangent, this is where I think a lot of software is going to go. I think a lot of people are going to create like little bespoke software for their own use. Not necessarily to sell as SAS products that you charge monthly for, but little things that solve problems in your life where you can go to something like Cursor or Claude Code or OpenAI's codeex, tell it to spin up a quick product for you that solves that problem, and now bottleneck overcome. At least that's how I'm using a lot of AI right now. And I think more and more people are going to catch on that this is a pretty good way to use AI.

Now, I know I just mentioned my thumbnail generator, but I also do use Nano Banana directly quite a bit inside of Gemini. In fact, if you look at this image right here that Nano Banana made for me. I started by giving it this image and then it gave me this based on my prompt, which I didn't like all this extra text and I didn't like how small it made me. And then it made me bigger with less text, but I didn't like this text. So, I told to get rid of that. And then finally, it came up with this. And then I just added the text myself using Canva. If this looks familiar to you, that's because it's literally one of the thumbnails on one of my more recent videos. These two right here were actually generated using that thumbnail generator I just showed you. And that little lobster guy that's in this thumbnail right here, well, I created that with Nano Banana. Also, it started as that, told it to make it more cartoony, added a little bit of shading, and that's where that guy from that thumbnail came from.

And this next one probably not going to be too relevant to most people, but I do use it every single day inside of YouTube Studio. If you do have a YouTube channel, there's actually AI built into YouTube Studio now called Ask Studio. If I click on this button, I can ask questions like, "What videos generated the most subscribers for me in the last 2 weeks?" I could submit that. And because it has access to my YouTube studio, and it knows all of my stats and all of my data, it's just going to go pull that for me. Here are the videos that gained you the most subscribers over the last 14 days. The AI wakeup call. Everyone needs an AI news video. Another AI news video. The Cladbot story just took a wild turn. And chat GPT tutorial, which is crazy cuz that's a really old video. So, I wouldn't have realized that, oh, this video that's almost a year old generated a good number of subscribers for me in the last 2 weeks. Cool to see that that video is still getting a ton of views. I find this Ask Studio inside of my YouTube dashboard to be really, really handy.

Now, another tool that I'm in every single day, and I've talked about it a lot in past videos, but I don't feel like I've talked about it much recently, is the tool that I use to do most of my research and keep my finger on the pulse of all the latest AI news. And that tool is called Feedley. Now, on the surface, Feedley is like an RSS feed reader. I do go and subscribe to a ton of blogs. No AI involved in this, right? I'm subscribed to Microsoft, Anthropic, AMD, Apple, 11 Labs, Grock, Meta, all of these companies. I'm subscribed to their corporate blogs, so I see any sort of press releases that they publish on their website. However, you'll also notice that I've got this AI web alerts here. Now, what this is is an actual AI that's going out there and finding news on other sources, sources that I didn't subscribe to the RSS feed. So, it's finding stuff from The Verge, Fierce Healthcare. Like I would have never subscribed to the RSS feed of Fierce Healthcare, but it's finding AI news for me from Fierce Healthcare. Here's one from payments.com. Definitely not one that I'm subscribed to, but I see news from it because this AI web alerts is keeping its eye on the web for me and finding news as it pops up on these other news sources. And what's really cool about this is that I can actually train it over time. I can say I want to see less like this. And over time, it starts to learn what type of news articles I want to see less of. And it tailors my feed for me and just gets better and better at showing me just the news that I'm going to be most likely to be interested in. Now, I believe this AI web alerts is only on the Feedley paid plan. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm fairly confident you do have to pay if you want the web alerts, but it's like Google alerts on steroids. It really, really keeps me looped in. That's how I know everything that's going on in the world of AI. like every single day is I'm skimming this feed and I also have it on my iPhone. I have it on my iPad. I have it on my laptop. No matter where I am, I can always kind of scroll the news and see if there's anything that's popped up.

All right, so next up is the tool that I use for my meetings. I am on a lot of meetings. I find myself on Zoom meetings, Google Meet Meetings, Microsoft Teams meetings, all sorts of different meeting platforms all the time. I know there's other tools out there. There's like Fathom. I believe tools like Google Meet and Zoom even have this kind of functionality built in now. But what I like about Granola is that it just sort of runs in the background. It doesn't like invite another user into the call. And as you're talking and the other people are talking on the meeting, it's pulling in notes on what the meeting's about. It's keeping track of action items that you say you'll do, keeping track of action items that other people say they'll do. And it's really, really handy to go review after your meeting's over. And this is one that I just started using recently. Like I've heard about Granola for a while now. I heard about it I think a couple years ago, but never really gave it much of a chance. And I posted something on Twitter not too long ago where I said I record a lot of my meetings with OBS and then take the audio from that OBS and have it transcribed with Assembly AI and then have Claude give me action steps. And it was like this long multi-step process that I was doing. And one of my buddies, Alex Vulov, was like, "Dude, that's just granola with extra steps." So, I was like, "Oh, maybe I should go give Granola another shot." I downloaded it and was instantly a fan. You can see this has been so recent for me that I'm actually still on the free trial, but it definitely is getting used.

The other thing that I do like about Granola is as I'm on the call, I can actually handype notes like questions about newsletter sponsors or they said something about Optimizely, and I can just give like rough notes that don't have much context. And because it's listening to the transcript, it will actually fill in the additional context for you. So it'll see your rough notes and assume, okay, those are things that he wants to remember and then attach the context around what that little note was for. And I find that to be really cool as well.

And finally, the last one is 11 Labs. And I save this one for last cuz I can't really say I use this every day, but it does get used every week. So I co-host this podcast called The Next Wave. This podcast is actually owned by HubSpot and I just am one of the hosts. In the early days of the podcast, I was actually given scripts and I would record the sponsorship ad read in every single podcast. However, to save time and also to lean into the available technology, we started using 11 Labs instead where I gave my producer over on the next wave access to my voice inside of 11 Labs and now he doesn't even contact me to do the ad reads. I know all the ad reads are just going to be promoting HubSpot. They're not going and doing like Seialis ads on my behalf. It's always an ad promoting HubSpot. So, I know the content of all the ads and I trust them not to use my voice in a way that I wouldn't be comfortable with. So, now instead of sending me a script, they just take the script that they generate, throw it into 11 Labs, and then my voice reads that script that becomes the ad in every single one of these podcast episodes. I don't even have to record the ads anymore over on that show. It's awesome.

But if you're not familiar with 11 Labs, it's got a lot of other features as well. You can do a voice changer where you speak out something and then have it remake that thing with your voice or somebody else's voice. It's got voice isolator. You can have it generate sound effects. You can have it generate music. It's even generating images and videos now. But my main use, and I think most people's main use case of 11 Labs is the text to speech. Like I've got my voice here, which I trained back in June of 2025. And since then, I think the model's gotten even better. So, I should probably train it in again. Like, they now have this 11v3 model, which my voice isn't trained on yet. But I can type any text here. For example, something like this, and then click generate speech, and it will give us audio back. Make sure to subscribe to Matt Wolf and click like on this video. Kind of gave me a British accent at the end there, but I could click regenerate, and it'll give me another version. Make sure to subscribe to Matt Wolf and click like on this video. that time I think it was more Australian. But anyway, those are the tools that I use pretty much every single day with maybe the exception of 11 Labs which I use more like once a week and Granola when I have meetings and I don't have meetings every single day but every other tool that I mentioned other than those last two I literally use every single day.

So, anybody that's out there saying that AI is not useful, it doesn't improve productivity, it's not helpful, which I have heard a lot of surprisingly, these are all the ways that I'm actively using it to make my life and my business easier. And now with things like Claudebot, I'm starting to play with that even more. I'm not super comfortable showing everything I built there yet because there's still some security stuff, but Matthew Burman has put out some amazing videos on Clawbot. So, if you haven't watched Burman's videos on those yet, definitely check those out. like he's blowing my mind with what he's doing with Claudebot. And that might even eliminate some of the tools that I mentioned here, but that's also a lot more complex than most people actually want to deal with right now. So, this is what I'm using and it's been awesome. I mean, it saved me so much time. Like, I could probably put in 2 hours of work a day and get everything done I need because of all of these tools that I put into place that leverage AI to make my life easier. So, that answers that question for you.

And there's going to be more tools that pop up that I'm going to love and want to tell you about. And if you want to hear about the new tools that get introduced into my workflow, as well as stay on top of all the latest news, get cool AI tutorials and breakdowns and all that kind of stuff, make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel, and I'll make sure that more amazing AI content shows up in your YouTube feed. Thank you so much for hanging out with me, nerding out with me, and uh letting me show off the tools that I actually use on a daily basis. But that's what I got for you. Hopefully I'll see you in the next one.