Transcription
In this video, we're going to walk through the best AI tools for writers in 2026. My name is Jason and this is a channel all about creative writing with AI as a creative partner rather than as a replacement. We're going to discussing six tools today, which is less than the other version of this video that I've made in the past because A, these tools have gotten so good that we really need less of them and B, I think I've actually narrowed it down to the best of the best.
Now, full disclosure, one of the tools on this list is my own, which I just released, so I can no longer be completely unbiased when making these lists, but I will say that my tool is kind of in its own category. It doesn't really have that many direct competitors and I have genuinely tried my best to remain objective here. And even though I have my own tool, I'm also using most of the other tools on this list every single week, if not daily.
First, I want to discuss what I typically recommend for people in their AI tool set. And I generally recommend that you have one AI chatbot and that AI chatbot acts as a kind of catch-all for any particular use case that you might have. And then in addition to that, I recommend having a writing-specific tool, of which there are a couple on this list. And that allows you to have a very specific workflow for the writing process that might be more tailored to that writing process. A chatbot has a very simple interface, meaning it is capable of doing a lot of different things, but it's not really tailored, not really specifically designed for any one of those things. It's just meant to be one simple interface for everything. And it's useful to have a AI-specific tool that is specific to whatever it is you're doing, whether that is coding or writing. And in this case, we want something that is good for writers. So, I have a couple of chatbots on this list and I have a couple of writing-specific tools on this list. So, let's dive in, first starting with the chatbots.
Now, I actually have two chatbots on this list and I use them both for different things. Now, Claude's chatbot is easily one of the best out there, especially for getting any kind of substantial work done. It's one of the best out there for coding. It's one of the best and traditionally has been one of the best for writing in general. And it's the one that I turn to if I ever need to actually develop content or develop program or something like that. It's also the one that I turn to if I really need it to think about a particular problem. Because for whatever reason, Claude is really good at getting its models to think through a problem. And that really leads to much better results overall.
Now, specifically, I recommend this version of Claude. When you join a Claude membership, you can actually download a desktop version. And that desktop version includes the regular chatbot like you can see here. But it also includes over here on the side, you can access co-work and code, which you know, I could make a whole like full course video going through everything that you need to know about Claude. And some of these features are a bit more advanced. But I will say like if there's any kind of project that you're working on such as a book, then knowing how to use Claude code and Claude co-work are excellent tools in your arsenal. And I know a lot of authors that have just totally migrated to Claude for all of their use cases. The only downside that I find for Claude is that you don't have access to other models other than the Claude models. And these days we are starting to get a few models that are work better for writing than the Claude models, at least in certain instances. I still find Claude to be one of the best out there and it's certainly one of the best at thinking through a scene and understanding what would actually make sense for like the structure of the scene.
And that leads me to my second chatbot, which is Perplexity. Now, Perplexity I use in a totally different case from Claude. Where where I use Claude as kind of my workhorse chatbot, I use Perplexity as really more like my personal chatbot. It has become if I could sum it up in one phrase, it would be as a Google replacement. Perplexity has pretty much replaced Google for me. I use it to ask all kinds of questions. I use it to just have regular conversations if I'm just curious about something because for one, it's way faster than Claude. Uh Claude can do all of the things that Perplexity can do because it takes a whole lot of time in its processing and thinking and stuff. I often find it's just quicker to go to Perplexity when I need a quick answer to a quick question. Additionally, because Claude has pretty strict throttling going on, meaning they will cut you off if you're using it too much, I find that Perplexity has less of that. And so, I would rather go to Perplexity to do all of the sort of miscellaneous tasks that I have or miscellaneous inquiries and use Claude for anything where I need more substantial AI power. But honestly, both of these chatbots have a lot of the same features. And if you could only have one of them, I would probably pick Claude of the two. But they're both good and they will both work. The only thing that I like better about Perplexity is the fact that we have different models here. So, unlike Claude where you can only use the Claude models, Perplexity allows you to use their own proprietary sonar models. There's GPT models in here, Gemini models, and even a few additional models like GLM 5.2, Kimmy K2.6, and so on. Uh and if you're watching this in the future, you might see others as well. That makes Perplexity a little bit more versatile in my opinion, which is nice to have that flexibility. But there are some problems with Perplexity. The main one being it's not as good for getting like actual substantial work done, like creating content. And uh you also they have certain elements in their terms of service that rub me the wrong way. And they make it so that you probably don't have the commercial rights to use your content. Doesn't mean Perplexity does instead, cuz they also aren't claiming commercial rights over that content. They just don't want you to be using the content in commercial ways. So, it's great for something like a Google replacement, but I would still use Claude if you're planning to do a lot of writing or coding or any of that type of work using AI.
All right, let's move on to the third one. Now, this is quite a bit different. This is a program called N8N, and this is an automation tool. There are others out there that are almost as good. make.com is another of the well-known automation platforms. It's maybe a little bit easier to learn, but I find N8N to be a lot more powerful. And so, if you want to get into automations, I recommend N8N. This is an example automation that I made that I used to flesh out characters. So, all I have to do is bring in the context of what I wanted to look through, and it identifies all of the names of the characters that it needs to flesh out, and then it runs a loop on all of them going through and flushing out every single character. And this has done a tremendous job so far being able to do that. And I even built this into my own tool, which I'll show in a minute. But, the advantage to understanding a complex automation platform like this is that you can essentially use it to make your own software. That's essentially all I I was doing. I was creating my own mini software tools that were tailored to any particular specific problem that I have. And because the possibilities are endless here, there's a lot of power that you can get with an automation platform, and I strongly recommend you learn an automation platform, whatever that is. Because I don't just use these for writing purposes. I actually use this for things like managing email, or for helping me write YouTube scripts, or different things like that. Not for this channel, but for some other thing other projects that I've tried before. And it's can be incredibly effective at just creating a custom workflow for whatever you need it to do, which means it can save you tons of time in your business or in your personal life even or even at work. You could probably build one of these things at work and get it to do a lot of the things that you would normally do. I even have a member of my community that started really getting into N8N and got a huge promotion at work for some of the systems that he started implementing there. So, it's definitely a skill worth having.
Now, the biggest problem with N8N or even pretty much any automation platform is that there is a fair bit of a learning curve involved in the process, which I do recommend you learn. However, I wanted to create something that was able to have the same power, but was maybe a little bit easier for people to learn. And that is how I ended up developing my very first tool. And that tool is called Story Hacker OS. And what this does is it is essentially a mashup of your typical writing specific AI tool that you'd find elsewhere combined with the power of N8N. And what I've managed to do is create this automation system. So, each one of these things that you see here is an automation moving all the way from creating your first story dossier based on all of your ideas that you're just dumping all the way over to creating a the actual chapters, the actual prose of your book. And we're working on adding more in here like some editing features, a way to build a series and a lot more. But, the main thing that really sets this tool apart from others is that it has A these automations, which are a big part of it. But, B I've actually created a whole bunch of templates. So, if you look at this, you can actually see we've added a bunch of genre templates because we I really have done a whole lot of research. I went out and found about 220 some genres on Amazon that were doing really well today commercially and essentially did this big analysis of all of them to create some of these genre guides cuz AI really thrives with structure. So, I found that using structure in the form of these genre guides is a great way to create a book that is much more likely to appeal to the reader. And to my knowledge, this is the only tool that I know of that has that system involved in the process. Most of the others will rely on you knowing all of those tropes and all of those key plot points and everything for the genre that you're trying to write in so that you would direct it to do that. None of the other tools to my knowledge actually give you a lot of that information up front so that you're a little bit closer to that goal and then you can just take it from there and make it your own.
Now, I've done a couple of videos already on Story Hacker OS, so I won't get into all of the features that it has available, but suffice it to say it is my dream child and hopefully it's something that could be really useful to all of you. It is also critically a part of my Story Hacker membership and it is not a separate product in addition to that membership. So, in addition to the tool, you also get a bunch of courses, you get regular access to me because I'm not interested in just making something that anybody can access. I'm interested in making something that the right people who are willing to invest in themselves including in the education and going through that transformative arc from, you know, someone who may never have written a book before to actually having a book-selling business. Those are the kind of people I want in here. So, if that sounds interesting to you, if that sounds like you, you can check out the link in the description below.
If not, I do have a another alternative. This is not really a perfect competitor to what I've built, but it uh a lot of people might see it that way. And if you're not interested in the whole membership and the educational aspect of Story Hacker, then I would strongly recommend this one, Novel Crafter. Novel Crafter is perhaps the writing specific tool with the most freedom. If you are the kind of nitpicky person who wants to micromanage the AI all along the way and really has a very a vision that you want to help guide, then NovelCrafter is the one that you definitely want to look at. One of the key things about NovelCrafter is that allows you to build up a extensive codex. So, all of your character, location, all of that kind of information, it's stored in the tool right here. There's lots that you can do in NovelCrafter. It's definitely one of my favorite tools overall, but it does have a learning curve and it is complicated and you can suffer a little bit from blank page syndrome because there's not a whole lot of guidance you started. That's kind of what I was trying to solve with my own tool, but if you like I said, if you're not into what I created, this would be the next best alternative in my opinion. And I think it's still one that I am very comfortable promoting because it is an incredibly powerful tool. It also has some features that I don't actually have in my membership like collaboration with other people, like being able to work on the same project with another person like a co-writer. So, that is something that maybe we can add in the future, but that's something that you can get in NovelCrafter that you can't get in mine. So, that is NovelCrafter. It is definitely a good one to check out. And by the way, there are links to all of these below. Some of them affiliate, some not.
There's one more tool that I want to show off for you today that is not so much a writing specific tool as it is an editing specific tool. And that is AutoCrit. AutoCrit is by far my favorite editing tool out there. Like it's not even close. I use this more than ProWritingAid. I use it more than Grammarly because it's really tailored for writers of fiction and non-fiction like long-form books. Now, other tools like ProWritingAid and Grammarly can be useful if you're doing proofreading for emails and other like miscellaneous writing projects, but for books, which is what we care about on this channel, AutoCrit is the your go-to for sure. And one of the reasons I like them and one of the reasons why I'll continue to promote them even if I came up with similar features in my own tool, they've done a lot of work that I couldn't possibly hope to do involving actually analyzing a whole bunch of books in in different genres and making sure that data was in their platform. Like for instance, right now you can see over here it shows that there are in a work this size approximately 54 cliches in the fantasy genre on average and it found that I had 27. And this is just cliches and it'll point out what these are so I could select okay, over the edge is kind of a cliche phrase. So I could go to this and say okay, do I want to change this or what? Additionally looks like actually the second one is just right here. So I could go through and look through all of these and see if there's a different way I want to phrase that. Additionally, I could look at let's say showing versus telling and over here it's going to do the analysis of the book and show me how many times I'm using common telling phrases that could be indicators that I want to use more showing language. And it'll do so by comparing it to how many of those things appear in my genre. You can pick whatever genre you have. So you can see my count is pretty good compared to the fantasy overall so I would say this is okay where I'm at right here. But in addition to features like this, there are some AI features as well. And my favorite is the alpha and beta reader feature where I can select a ideal reader. Let's just say we've got fantasy reader, harsh critic, science fiction reader. Since this is not a science fiction book, it would be a bad idea to select the science fiction reader and I'll bet if I did they would come back very dissatisfied. But I'm just going to select the harsh critic and we'll go ahead and start reading. And this will take a little while but eventually it'll kind of go through the whole book and identify what are some things that I could improve from a beta reader type standpoint. So this AI will take on the persona of a beta reader and you know, that might sound like oh, well can't I just do that in Claude? But when you actually look at the results, you see it actually gives you highly actionable, very useful feedback that I think would be very similar to what I might actually want to use if or what I might actually encounter if I met up with a developmental editor or something like that. So, you can see it has gone ahead and finished its overall analysis and it says the story is pretty good, the reader fit could use some work. And it gives me explanations for that. It gives me like a favorite line. It gives me the emotion by chapter. It gives me an overview of characters. And if you click on any one of these little hashtags here, it'll actually take you to the moment where that it's actually referencing there, which is actually a really cool feature and something that would be I don't know how they did it. It would be very difficult to code AI to do something like that. So, overall, I I really love this and it's a great way to kind of get feedback on your book, especially if you don't have the audience to actually have a whole team of beta readers for your book.
So, those are my six primary tools that I recommend for authors who want to write uh particularly fiction with their books. Although, some of these will work for non-fiction as well. If you've watched this far, but the tools are just the first part of the process and there's really a whole system that I have developed myself on how to go from zero to your book in hand having published it on Amazon or wherever you want to publish it. And to go over that entire process, I have a whole full course video that goes over the whole thing, which you can check out right here. So, go check that out and I will see you in the next video.