Transcription
Well, it's the new year, and if you're anything like me, you want to be as productive as possible this year. You don't always want to have to sit at your computer to do it. That's why in this video, I'm going to break down 10 apps that you can get for free on your mobile phone that are going to help you be more productive.
So let's just get right into it, starting with number one, which is the Perplexity app. Now, most of you are probably already familiar with Perplexity, but there's a lot that it can do that most people don't even realize. You probably already know that you can ask it anything, and it will search the web, then combine what it finds on the web with an AI model to give you even more information about what it found.
You can ask it things like, "What are the best YouTube channels to keep up with AI news?" It'll search the web for you, do a little research, and share the best YouTube channels on the topic. But did you know you can also take pictures with Perplexity and ask about the pictures?
For example, take this Coke Zero can. If I press the little square icon next to the search bar, it'll open up my camera. I can take a photo and ask, "Is this healthy?" and it'll tell me what it finds. Based on this, I should probably drink a lot less Coke Zeros.
But Perplexity also has a voice mode where you can just have conversations with it, and as you're talking to it, it will also search the web for you. For instance, "What are some of the highest-rated taco shops in Rancho San Diego, California?" Some of the highest-rated taco shops in Rancho San Diego include Fresh Mexican Food, known for its casual atmosphere and quality tacos, with a 4.5 rating and 79 reviews.
Serita's Taco Shop is another popular spot, open 24/7 and beloved for its surf and turf burritos and carne asada fries, with a 4.2 rating and 1,447 reviews. They already got the right answer! I eat at Albert's Taco Shop all the time.
By the way, the little jitter in the audio that you heard there, that's not in the app; that's just because I'm trying to sync my app to my computer, and it's creating a little bit of a lag, which caused that little hiccup in the audio. The app's pretty solid when it comes to the audio.
Another feature that I really like about the Perplexity app is the Discover button. It's the button that kind of looks like a volleyball or something down at the bottom. If you click on that, it will actually just suggest things that it thinks you might be interested in, and I could just simply scroll up to read more about the various things.
For instance, let's say I want to learn more about Apple's first USA-built AI chip. I can click into this app here, and you can see it's going to provide me a whole bunch more information along with some good resources to dive even deeper. If I want, I can go all the way down to the bottom and ask follow-up questions and get even more information about it.
Hands down, the Perplexity app is probably my most used AI tool. It is so helpful; I literally use it every single day.
Next up, probably the most famous AI app at the moment, which is ChatGPT. The main reason I love the ChatGPT app is that I love talking to the advanced voice assistant. For the longest time, it was only available to Pro users, but they recently made the voice mode available to everyone.
So if I click on the little circle with the waveform right next to my message box here, it opens up the chat app, and I can have conversations with it. One way that I love to use this is almost as an audio journal—just have a conversation with it. I love chatting with it about things I'm struggling with and getting feedback from ChatGPT.
For example, "I have a YouTube channel focused on AI tools and AI news. What are some ways that I can grow the YouTube channel?" One great way to grow your channel is to engage with your audience through comments and polls, creating a community around your content. You could also collaborate with others in your niche to reach new audiences.
Additionally, diversifying content with a mix of long-form videos, shorts, and live streams can keep your audience engaged. Experimenting with topics and regularly analyzing your analytics to see what works best will also help you fine-tune your strategy.
What's great about this is that at any time, I can go back to the web browser app and review previous conversations that I had with the voice chat. So if I am out for a walk or on a drive and I just want to share a quick thought, it's actually a great way to do it—to share the thought, get some feedback, and then review the thought and feedback later. Super, super helpful.
Now, I can't talk about AI chatbots without mentioning Grok. They just rolled out a brand new app, and it's completely free to use. Now, it's honestly not my favorite large language model to chat with; however, it is the most uncensored model. So if there are people that want a sort of raw, rough response that's completely uncensored, Grok is the chatbot for you.
Not only that, but if you need it to generate AI images, it will also do that for free. Again, probably not the best AI image generator on the market, but it's still pretty good, especially considering that it's totally free to use. I can tell it created an image of a wolf howling at the moon within a few seconds. I have a few pretty good images and one really weird one.
Now, it's also really hard to demonstrate the uncensored nature of Grok without getting in trouble with YouTube, but I can ask it things like, "Roast the relationship between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg," and it often gives some pretty funny responses. Pretty much any other chatbot is going to refuse to talk dirty about anybody, but Grok won't hold back on any person. If you tell it to swear at you, it'll do that too—something you probably won't get out of many other chatbots.
Lately, I've had more and more people asking me about where they can go to build a website. People are starting to realize how valuable an online presence actually is, and whenever they ask me, I've been pointing them to Hostinger. Hostinger provides everything you need to grow online.
So check this out: if you head on over to hostinger.com/wolf and scroll down, you're going to want the Business Website Builder. It's only $3.49 a month for a 48-month plan—that's 75% off the normal price—and this is the plan that has all of the cool AI features.
When you get to the checkout page, if you click the coupon code button here and add in the code MATTWOLF and click apply, it takes an additional 10% off the price. Once you're inside your hosting account, check out how easy it is to create a website.
I'm going to click on Websites on the left, click on Add Website, and use the Hostinger website builder. This is their AI-powered website builder. Let's make a website about 3D printing. We'll call it 3D Print World. I'll give it a quick description of what the website's about and click Create Website.
Hostinger provides the hosting, the domain name, the images, the text—it literally builds the whole site for you within seconds. I have an entire site built; it even put a video in the background of a 3D printer running, put some images of 3D printers, and added text. I've got the bones for a great website, and if I don't like the way something looks, I could just click on it and drag it around to dial in the website however I want.
Plus, it's got a ton of amazing AI features like an AI image generator, AI writer, and so much more. Let's try the AI logo maker. For the description, I'll just type "3D printer" and click create. I add a little bit of text, and now I've got a pretty solid logo for the heading of my website.
It's super easy, and it really does provide everything you need all in one place to get your website online and running today. Check it out again over at hostinger.com/wolf, and don't forget to use the coupon code MATTWOLF. Thank you so much to Hostinger for sponsoring this video.
All right, next up, let's talk about Feedly. Feedly's free version doesn't actually have AI in it, but I find it to be one of the most valuable tools in my arsenal to keep looped in on the world of AI. Now, if you do pay for a premium account, it does add some AI features into it, like AI summarization and what they call Feedly Leo, which uses AI to search and help you find information about a given topic on the web.
But even without the AI features, I find it really helpful. For example, I follow the RSS feeds of all of these blogs: 11 Labs, Nvidia, Anthropic, Google, Black Forest, Grok, Meta, Hugging Face, Stability AI, Perplexity, Microsoft, etc. Every day, it gives me a feed of all of the top information from those companies.
So if anybody's ever curious about how I stay so looped in on the latest AI news and tools, well, Feedly is pretty much your answer. Let's say you come across an article on Feedly that you want to learn more about. I can go to the article's web page from Feedly here, and let's say this article is a little bit longer than what I have time to read right now.
Well, that's where the next app that I want to talk about comes in. Let's go ahead and copy the link to this article URL, and we'll open up our fifth app, 11 Reader. This is a free app where you can plug in any article, any document, or PDF, and it will actually read the article back to you using a very realistic voice.
You can pretty much turn any news articles that you're interested in reading into a podcast that you listen to on your drive, your daily walk, or at the gym, or wherever you might listen to a podcast. Let's go ahead and click the plus button down at the bottom, paste in a link, and we'll paste the link to the article we were just looking at.
Now, I simply click listen, and it creates an audio version of that article that you can listen to, and it sounds pretty realistic. Unfortunately, it doesn't want to play directly through my speaker, so this is the best I can do. Being interrupted is annoying; apparently, even AI-generated podcast hosts agree.
Also, Google Notebook LM's users discovered Notebook LM launched last year and went viral for its feature that creates entirely AI-generated podcast-like discussions. But maybe you don't want to listen to just the article; maybe you want it to be a little more conversational, a little more entertaining.
This button down at the bottom that says Gen FM, if I click on this, it will actually convert that article into a podcast episode that sounds like two hosts discussing that article. After about a minute or so, we actually have a podcast, so we can listen to that news with a little bit more personality.
And this time, it is playing directly through my computer. So check it out. Have you ever wondered if artificial intelligence could get offended? Well, Google just discovered their AI podcast hosts have quite the attitude when interrupted. That's fascinating! What exactly happened with these AI hosts?
So here's the situation: Google's Notebook LM, which creates AI-generated podcast discussions. You get the idea. I also thought it would be kind of meta to pull in an article about Notebook LM, which creates podcasts, into a reader—an app that, well, creates AI-generated podcasts.
But another solid way to get information without having to read an entire article is to use something like app number six, Arc Search. Arc Search is a browser for your mobile phone. You can use it just like any other browser to find a website you want to check out.
Let's do a Google search for Quantum Computing, and let's open up this article from IBM called "What is Quantum Computing?" Once on this website, I get a really long in-depth article all about Quantum Computing, but I just want the summary. I just want the bullet points real quick, and I'll come back and read the article later.
I can click this little arrow in the bottom right of my phone screen, and it pops up a new menu with options like summarize. Not to mention, notice the little detail at the bottom; it actually scrubbed all of the ads out of the page as well. But let's go ahead and click on the summarize button.
Give it a moment here, and after about 15 or 20 seconds, I have an entire summary in about six paragraphs of that giant article on quantum computing. It even breaks it up into sections like key principles, what are qubits, industry impact, current challenges, and future developments. I can get a quick overview to decide if this article is worth diving deeper into and reading the whole thing.
I've got the overview right here. The app also has some other really handy features. If I open up this menu again, we can see there's display options, and I can do things like translate the page or flip it over to reader mode, which removes everything from the article except for the text to make it really, really easy to just read the article.
Next up, let's talk about one of my favorite apps for when I go to things like conferences and meetings. I love the Otter app. Let's go ahead and open up the Otter app, and you'll notice down in the bottom right, there's a little microphone. If I press that microphone button while I'm in, let's say, a seminar or a meeting, I could just set it on the table or set it on the chair next to me, and it will record the entire presentation or the entire meeting.
Then it gives me summary notes and even lets me have a chat back and forth with the conversation that it recorded. So let's pretend for a moment that I'm sitting in the middle of a conference, and there's some presentations going on, and I want to remember what's being talked about. Instead of pulling out a notepad, I'm going to press this microphone button here, and it's going to start recording everything it's hearing.
It even transcribes it in real time, so you're seeing on the screen as I'm talking, it's transcribing it all. If I'm sitting in a conference, it's going to hear from the microphone everything that's being said from stage. If I'm sitting in a meeting, it's going to pick up the conversation that's going on in that meeting, transcribe the whole thing, and then save it.
When I'm done with this recording, I simply press the stop button, and you'll notice it created a new note. I can open up this note, and right now you can see that this was a quick conversation, and it will only generate summaries on longer meetings. Since I only recorded for 30 seconds, it didn't make a summary, but I can click over and see the transcript of everything that I was saying during this meeting or conference.
I recently went to a Cisco conference, and I sat in on a 29-minute panel. You can see a summary of that panel—here's the outline, multiple speakers, everything that was talked about during that actual panel. If I want, I can go back and read the entire transcript from the entire panel. It's all available right here.
Super helpful app if you want to be more engaged in the meeting or pay closer attention to what's being said on stage without worrying about furiously taking notes. Next up is the Google app, and you're probably thinking, "Why would you talk about the Google app?" I have the Google app because I love Google Lens.
Google Lens is a great tool. If I open up the Google app, you'll see that the little yellow button to the left below the search right here will open up Lens. So let's go ahead and click the Google Lens button down here, and you can see all of the images in my photo roll. But let's go ahead and select an image from when I was in England recently.
You can see that it automatically highlighted the building and then found that it is the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Sorry if I mispronounced that; I don't know if I'm saying that right. But just from that one photo, it was able to identify what that building was.
Let's go back to the main page of Google here because it can also turn on my camera and give me information about what I'm looking at in the real world. This water bottle right here—this is the water bottle that I sip from all day long. Let's say I want to know more information about it. I can point my phone at it like this, take a quick picture, and within seconds, it actually pulls up the exact water bottle that I have and tells me where I can buy it and how much it costs—all with just taking a photo.
It was like instant; I didn't speed that up. But that's not all the Google app is good for. It's also got a free translator built right into it. So let's say I'm traveling through Mexico and I don't speak the language. I can set the input language to English and the output language to Spanish, and then I can speak straight into the app, "Can you tell me where the closest seafood restaurant is?"
It then translates what I just asked into Spanish, and I have two options. I can either show my phone to whoever I'm trying to talk to or press the little speaker button. Now, when I need a reply from them, I just click the little button at the top to swap the languages, press the voice button again, and hold it up next to them as they respond, and it will translate it back to English for me.
That's super, super helpful if you're in an area where you don't speak the language. Next up is a brand new app that I just started playing with, and it's still in beta, so there's a little bit of a process to get it on your phone. But if you go to the Fabric website, there's a decent explanation of how to get it installed.
But like I mentioned, the app is called Fabric, and what this app does is it stores and organizes all of the screenshots on your phone. One of the ways that I use this is I screenshot a lot of interesting things that I see on Instagram, and then I've been tossing them into this app.
So let's go ahead and do that real quick. Let's say, for example, I come across this post on Instagram about how VLC Media Player has introduced a free AI subtitle with real-time translation, and I want to remember this and come back to it later. Well, I can simply screenshot it on my phone, open up the screenshot, click the little share button up in the top right, and we'll share it to the Fabric app.
I'll click save, and once it's shared to the app, I can just go ahead and delete the screenshot; I don't need it anymore. Now, when I pop back over to the Fabric app here, you can see it just populated with my new screenshot. I can click into it; there's a little info button that shows when the image was taken and some metadata around it.
But I can also click this ask button, and you can see there's a little summarize link. If I click summarize, it's actually going to read the text on the image and put some details about the image in here. So you can see it pulled in all of this information down here just by looking at the image, and I can even ask questions about the image.
But here's where this gets really cool. I think the coolest feature about this is it allows you to search all of your screenshots. So once this is loaded up with screenshots that you've taken from various websites—the Instagram one was a very simple example—but let's say you've taken screenshots all over the web.
I can click search, and I recently screenshotted something about the holiday glasses, so let's just search out "glasses," hit return, and you can see it found a screenshot about glasses that I took earlier today. Let's go ahead and do a search for AI, and you can see it's found all of the screenshots that are related to AI that I've saved in here.
I could search out VLC, and you can see it pulls up the screenshot that I just saved around VLC. We can see that the person who posted this on Instagram was ChatGPT Tricks. Let's do a quick search for ChatGPT Tricks here, and you can see once again it pulled up that post for us.
Pretty handy if you tend to take a lot of screenshots while browsing various apps with your phone. And the last app that I want to tell you about is one that you've probably already heard of but probably didn't realize it had a mobile app, and that's Grammarly.
Grammarly is a tool that will help fix your spelling and grammar when you're typing things. Normally, you do it with a keyboard on a computer, but it also works on your phone. Let's say I want to send a text message. If I click on the little globe in the bottom left of my phone here, you can see it actually added the Grammarly little icon to my phone.
Now, as I type stuff, it's going to correct what I'm typing. I'll go ahead and type a really bad couple of sentences here: "Hey there, let's do the lunch thing we were talking about doing. They love it." You can see it found three things to fix.
So if I click on the little button that says fix mistakes, it's going to analyze it for me, and one by one, I can accept all of these changes here, and it fixed my grammar and what I was saying. We've already got spell check built in, but now you've got grammar check as well.
There's even an AI assistant; it will automatically select the text that I've already got there, click continue, tell it to improve it, and generate text. You can see it fixed it and made it an even better sentence: "Hey there, let's do the lunch thing we discussed. They will love it."
I can go ahead and click insert, and it replaced my bad grammar sentences with a couple of better sentences that make me look less like an idiot. Another super helpful and free app that you can install on your phone that'll just make you look better in like every conversation you have through your phone.
And that's what I got for you—10 mobile apps that are totally free that are going to help you get more done, sound smarter, and be more productive. I use all of these apps; they've been really helpful, and I thought I'd make a cool video and share them with you.
So hopefully, you find this helpful. If you want to find more AI tools, be sure to check out Future Tools. This is where I share all the cool AI tools that I come across. I'm coming across new tools every single day, and I literally built this website to organize them and sort of help myself find the tools that I've come across in the past, and I made it available for anybody to check out.
I've also got a news page that shares all the latest AI news and a free newsletter that shares just the coolest AI tools with you and the most important news of the week. It's totally free to sign up, and anybody that signs up gets access to the free AI income database—a little database of cool ways to make some side money using various AI tools.
Again, totally free; check it out at Future Tools. Hopefully, you enjoyed this video and found some new tools to add to your arsenal. Thank you again to Hostinger for sponsoring this video, and thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you. Thanks again for nerding out; hopefully, I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye!