I tested hundreds of new tools this year. Many were duplicative. A few stuck with me because they’re so useful. The dozen noted below are helping me mine insights from notes, summarize meetings, design visuals— even code a little, without being a developer. You can start using any of these in minutes — no big budget or prompt engineering PhD required. Check out my list and leave a comment below noting one of your own favorites. 👇

Check out the full post online: https://wondertools.substack.com/p/wonder-tools-best-of-2024

Strengthen your work kit with AI

1. Search Smarter: Perplexity 🔎

Get instant, citation-backed briefings instead of drowning in a long list of search results. See how and why that’s so useful.

2. Mine Your Own Material: NotebookLM 📓

Apply AI to your notes and documents with citations and no hallucination. See examples and benefits.

3. Tackle Complex Work: Claude Projects 📂

Enhance work you’re doing on an ongoing basis. Upload relevant docs, files and give instructions and context to one of the best AI engines. It’s great not having to coach it from scratch on each query. Read more about why this is useful.

4. Edit text with an assistant: Lex 📝

Lex helps you get messages across clearly. Use it not to write for you but as an excellent editing assistant and watchdog suggesting fixes for grammar, cliches, passive voice, readability, brevity, repetition, & more. See more of my fave writing tools.

Enhance your visuals

5. Design engaging imagery: Ideogram ✍️

Make posters, graphics, illustrations or whatever you need to enhance documents, presentations, reports, or social media posts. Read more on why I love this tool.

6. Design Beautiful Docs: Craft 🎨

Create great-looking documents, notes, handouts, guides, and other visual resources without design skills. Version 3, just out, adds even more polish. See why I use Craft all the time.

7. Create Pro Media: Descript 💻

Edit audio and video as easily as editing a document. Why I rely on Descript. Others I found useful this year: Hypernatural for social video & Eddie for editing with natural language

9. Visualize Data: Napkin ✍️

Transform any description of an idea or framework into a neat infographic. Read my overview.

Power up workshops and meetings

10. Capture Meeting Gold: Fathom 🎥

Transform any Zoom call into an actionable summary with timestamped highlights.

11. Teach Interactively: Butter Scenes 🧑‍🏫

Lead engaging online sessions with a second screen for enhanced interaction.

Create games & apps with no prior skill

12. Build Without Coding: Windsurf Cascade 🧑‍💻

Turn your ideas into working software without any technical knowledge. I was delighted at the ease and speed with which I could start creating. See what I learned and examples of what I made.

📺 Here’s my video summary 👇

Dig Deeper

Perplexity 🔎 Search with AI

Why this is a winner: Google searches require sorting through dozens of links and lots of irrelevant material. Perplexity, by contrast, offers useful summary briefings on any topic you want to learn about, with relevant citations, so you can dig deeper into original sources.

How I use it: To get up to speed quickly on concepts, people or topics that are new to me, for both work and leisure interests. Also for product comparisons, to educate myself on cultural trends with helpful citations, and to find useful sources for context on historical events.

Read more: My take on how to make the most of Perplexity

NotebookLM 📓 Apply AI to research

Why this is a winner: Draw connections between up to 50 files and documents that relate to a project you’re working on. NotebookLM has a huge context window so you can upload millions of words for each project, much more than you can add on other platforms. You get helpful insights with citations to help you return to relevant sections of your documents.

An example of how I use it: I created a notebook for my Readwise highlights, which includes the passages I’ve marked in my Kindle books, online articles I’ve highlighted, and podcasts I’ve listened to with Snipd. Now I can query my own highlights on my favorite passages from the past decade to gain insight about material that’s resonated with me.

Streamline Collaboration

Fathom 🎥 Sum up meetings with AI

Why this is a winner: Following up on dozens of meetings is hard. Fathom makes it easy by giving you great summaries of any online gathering. You get both a summary and a timecoded transcript so you can jump directly to key moments in your recording.

Other strengths: It’s easy to set up by linking it to your calendar. That enables it to join your Zooms. Afterwards you can send other attendees a link to the summary. You can auto-request approval so no one is surprised by having an AI present. If you ever don’t want it there, it’s easy to remove or turn off. You can even mark highlights during the meeting with a button click. I still use the free version — it’s so good you may not need to pay.

How I use it: To summarize and return to important points in internal and external meetings, and to record and share live workshops and events I host.

Good alternatives: Supernormal is great for transcribing and summarizing meetings, alerting you to follow-up tasks from those meetings, and allowing you to expand on important points in the summary. Granola is great for allowing AI to flesh out your own meeting notes.

Claude Projects 📂 Apply AI to ongoing work

Why this is a winner: Most AI chatbots focus on standalone queries. You ask for input once. Then you start over later with a new prompt. But my work — and I’m guessing at least some of yours — often stretches out over days or weeks, requiring multiple related steps.

How it works: Claude Projects allows me to upload relevant documents and give it specific instructions for each project I’m working on. It then gives me helpful ideas and analysis, provides useful editing suggestions, and helps me think through problems.

How I use it: I like having a digital assistant for ongoing or repetitive work. It helps me when I get stuck or confused. It also comes in handy when I’m filling out repetitive forms or preparing to facilitate book discussions.

Read more: Here’s my overview, with detailed examples and features

Craft 🎨 Design attractive documents

Craft just launched version 3 with lots of new design upgrades. Check out my introduction to Craft for more on how to use it. Whether I’m teaching, writing or public speaking, it’s one of my favorite tools for making and sharing handouts. I use it to make reports, proposals, sales guides, journal pages, and teaching resources. It’s especially useful if you teach, train, or need to create any kind of visual guide, travel plan, or handout.