The Nifty AI Tools List

We are living in the dawn of for-realsies A.I. tools. This is our collection of the most useful ones we have come across that don't require a PhD or computer science degree to utilize and actually have some practical, productive business use (at least for our needs here at VentureCraft). Have a recommendation for the list? Send us a tip!

Last Updated: 12/21/2022

Note: Order is by how often we utilize the tool.

Motion

Link: http://usemotion.app
Category: Productivity
How We Use It: My calendar is sacred to me. I am most productive when I block out time on my calendar to focus and work on projects. In an ideal world, I'd be able to take an hour on Monday to plan out my week, block out time, and then knock stuff out project by project. In the real world, however, nothing provokes clients to have fires I need to put out like a well organized calendar. As a result, I gave up on trying to utilize time blocks since I could never predict my clients' mission critical needs. That's where Motion comes in. As projects come in, I input them into Motion, describe how long it should take, when it is due, priorities, etc. Then Motion populates my calendar with time blocks to focus on those projects. If life happens and I need to deviate from my calendar, or if an important meeting comes up, that's fine — Motion's AI automatically reconfigures my entire week to optimize my time to be as productive as possible. As a bonus, it also has its own Calendly-like service built in, so I could cancel that subscription.
Free to Try?: Sorta. It has a 7 day free trial, but 7 days is pretty worthless to decide if something this comprehensive is valuable to your workflow. If you're interested, feel free to reach out to us and I can provide a referral code that turns the trial into a 14-day trial + $100 credit if you subscribe.
Premium Tier: $228/year
Worth Noting: I love this app, but it was clearly designed by developers. The UI/UX can be garbage at times. But they seem to be improving things and, ultimately, it is a powerhouse of productivity value so I put up with the lack of polish.

DALL E 2 - OpenAI

Link: https://openai.com/dall-e-2
Category: Graphics
How We Use It: Prototyping logo concepts, or quickly generating stock images (like in this blog post). DALL E 2 is a powerful AI design engine that is not only capable of generating genuinely creating compositions, but can assist in the overall creative process by exploring your imagination in a more tactile way.
Free to Try?: Yes. It takes 1 credit to generate 4 compositions based on a prompt. You get 50 free credits when you sign up, and then 15 free credits per month.
Premium Tier: $15 per 115 credits
Worth Noting: Though this is arguably one of the easiest, most accessible AI visual tools currently available to play with. However, there are others that offer (arguably) more powerful engines. Midjourney is amazing, but only accessible through their Discord server. The most powerful at the moment is probably Stable Diffusion, but requires a bit of tech savvy to utilize. Lastly, it's important to note that creating art with AI is like communicating with an alien. The quality of your prompt and ability to articulate what you want will ultimately determine how successful your results are. There are a few communities dedicated to sharing prompt samples worth checking out, such as Promptist, PromptDB, Dallery, and PromptBase.

Playground - OpenAI

Link: https://beta.openai.com/playground
Category: Text
How We Use It: Prototyping marketing copy and A/B testing.
Free to Try?: Yes. You get 4,000 characters to start.
Premium Tier: $0.02 per 750 words
Worth Noting: This can be a bit complex to use, but with practice is worth learning. I've found that most "AI" tools out there currently that implement some sort of natural language writing algorithms are actually just hooking into OpenAI's Playground since it is so powerful. In fact, it's upcoming GPT-4 algorithms have been claimed to defeat the Turing Test.