Wonder Tools

Claude has quietly become one of the most powerful AI tools. Its most surprising and useful feature launched this summer: Projects. I can now train Claude to assist me with anything I’m working on by uploading up to 500 pages of my relevant notes, files, and examples.Read the full published post on SubstackHow to use Claude ProjectsStep 1. Upload contextual materials. After initiating a new project I upload relevant materials. I can provide examples of my past work, outlines, notes, interview transcripts, past feedback, or whatever else might help ensure the relevance and usefulness of AI replies.Step 2. Set custom instructions. I provide Claude with custom instructions for supporting me on the project. I tell it about my project’s context and goals. I specify a role Claude should play. And I detail the desired tone, form, and style of responses Claude should provide in response to my prompts.Note: These overarching project instructions are not specific to any one prompt. They remain part of Claude’s instructions over the course of a long series of iterative queries. But they’re only for that project, so they won’t interfere with how Claude responds to my prompts related to other projects.Step 3: Begin prompting. I draft prompts for Claude to assist me as I work on the project. I provide these prompts to reduce the time I spend on menial or technical tasks Claude can take care of splendidly. That allows me to expand the range of creative ideas I can consider and ensures I have the bandwidth to do work I would otherwise have to give up on.Benefits of Claude ProjectsI can create as many projects as I need. It’s easy to create separate projects for each area of focus. For each project, I upload materials specifically relevant to that project.For example, for a teaching project, I can upload past teaching plans I’ve created, as well as transcripts of presentations I’ve given. For a new volunteering project I’m working on, I can upload my past notes, ideas, outlines, and drafts to help Claude assist me in developing a new multifaceted project plan.Why this is useful. Rather than tossing queries at ChatGPT with just a short prompt to give it context, Claude can tailor its answers based on extensive background materials, past examples, and detailed instructions. That transforms it into a hyper-personalized digital assistant.Note on privacy. Anthropic, which operates Claude, doesn’t train its model on the material I upload or the prompts I submit. Here’s the policy summarized simply. Exceptions to this arise if material you submit is flagged for safety or trust review, or if you give a response a thumbs up or down. That’s one reason I don’t use the thumbs up/down feature to rate Claude’s responses.Pricing: Claude’s basic AI is free for anyone to use. Projects, though, require Claude Pro, at $20/month. I justify spending that on Claude by observing that it’s performing the role of a valuable digital assistant for a month for less than what it might cost me to hire someone for an hour.The team plan costs $25/month/person and requires at least five members, who can then share and collaborate on projects.Ideas for using Claude’s Projects* Draft project or event plans. Provide Claude with notes, goals, deadlines, project context and any other relevant documents. Prompt it to assist you in creating detailed project plans, timelines, memos, step-by-step task lists and more.Tip: Remind Claude to ask questions whenever it needs additional information to provide targeted, useful responses. Give it feedback after its initial responses to push it in whatever direction you need.* Prepare for workshops or classes. Provide background on the class or workshop you’re teaching, your objectives, and your pedagogical style. Then task Claude with assisting you in generating examples to use in class, provocative discussion or quiz questions, outlines for slide presentations, analogies, anecdotes, jokes or whatever else might help you create engaging sessions.Tip: Ask it to generate multiple possible approaches and instruct it to be surprising, creative and to create intriguing, unexpected materials.* Get assistance on hobby projects. Whether you’re putting together an outline for fan fiction, a visitor’s guide to your plant collection, or an onboarding guide for a new volunteer or club member, you can save hours with Claude’s project assistance.30+ more ways to use Claude ProjectsI created a project with Claude so it could help me dream up a collection of ideas for surprising ways to use Claude Projects.Prompting TipsIn addition to uploading relevant documents, provide detailed instructions about the kinds of responses that will be useful for you. For example, if you set up a project to assist you with a class aimed at students at a particular grade or skill level, note that so that responses will take that level into account. Additional tips:* Define your target tone. Ask Claude to adopt a casual tone or to be concise and direct in its responses or to use whatever style of language you prefer.* Assign a role. Ask Claude to respond to your prompts from the perspective of an expert in your specific industry or job.* Remind Claude to go slow. For complex tasks that have multiple parts, tell Claude to "think step-by-step" and ask it to "explain your reasoning” to ensure it takes into full account the materials and details you’ve shared.Caveats* Claude can’t generate images like ChatGPT Pro or Microsoft’s free Copilot.* The steep $20/month charge only seems worthwhile if you use Projects. Claude’s top model is now available, albeit for limited use, in its free plan. So if you’re just interested in occasional isolated queries, there’s no need to pay.* You can’t upload links into Claude as you can with some AI tools that will parse them for you. Nor can you upload video or audio files, though you can upload transcripts of those files.Alternatives* NotebookLM is a useful free Google tool that lets you create notebooks with your own documents you can then query with AI. Here’s my guide. It’s a great free alternative to Claude if your goal is to observe patterns in your documents or explore connections with your materials. But Claude provides Claude provides a richer, fuller chat interaction based on documents you upload than NotebookLM.* Perplexity lets you create Pages based on search queries to organize summary material on topics you’re exploring. Helpfully, the information you curate in Pages includes citations, so you can trace the info back to its original sources. Rather than deriving these pages from your own material, though, Perplexity’s Pages assist you in organizing information its provided through its AI-powered searches. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Discover a toolkit of innovative tools designed to transform teaching! Explore how Coda can create interactive syllabi with embedded videos and live polls. Learn about Craft for elegant one-page resources and discover alternatives like Genially, Padlet, and FigJam that enhance collaboration among students. Dive into user-friendly platforms such as Kahoot and Pear Deck for fun engagement. Unlock the potential for creativity and interactivity in the classroom while keeping costs low!

Pens. Pencils. Typewriters. Computers. Wordstar. Word. Google Docs. Writing tools continually evolve. That evolution has brought us hundreds of writing apps to choose from. Read on for recommended tools for various writing challenges.For the full written post online, visit https://wondertools.substack.com/p/writing-tools-for-busy-people 🤩 If you’re easily distracted — iA WriterThe simplest writing interface. Too many writing apps have cluttered, distracting interfaces. I know I’m procrastinating when I find myself exploring styling options. iA Writer is the purest app I’ve found for streamlined composition. All I see are the words I’m typing.Highlight writing issues: An optional setting points out cliches and filler words. The software can also spotlight your syntax by color — adjectives in brown, adverbs in purple, verbs in blue, etc. Mostly I appreciate the clean interface.Pricing: 2-week free trial, then $50 for Apple devices, $30 for Windows or Android.🧐 If you get stuck with writer’s block: LetterlyGet past the blank page problem by talking out loud about your ideas without worrying about precise wording. With Letterly and other AI dictation apps like Oasis ($50/year), it’s easy to convert spoken thoughts into drafts. Until late August you can get a lifetime license of Letterly for $59. Normally $10/month.Letterly and Oasis transcribe what you say then convert it into a variety of formats like an outline, summary, social post, or a draft blog or journal entry.Desktop Alternative: The Oasis team just launched a useful new Mac AI app called TalkTastic. It lets you dictate, transcribe and transform text into any writing app. You can use it with Google Docs, Word, or any other software.When I’m stuck looking at a word count of zero, I like opening up one of these apps and talking to myself about a few ideas. It’s a form of oral freewriting. Within a few minutes I have sentences to build on.If you’re working on a book project — ScrivenerWhen you’re working on a long writing project with multiple parts, try Scrivener. It gives you multiple ways to see and edit the sections of your work. I like the index card view, which allows for dragging cards around to reorder material.Pricing: After a monthlong free trial, it’s $60 for a one-time purchase for Mac or Windows ($51 for educators). Or $24 for iOS.💌 If you’d like to write with others — EtherpadEtherpad is an open source writing tool I like for collaborative live brainstorming, writing and editing. You can use it online for free at sites like Framapad and pad.education, or set up your own instance with a little coding. Here’s an example of a collaborative doc I started. Add to it to try out Etherpad.🤖 If you like experimenting with AI — LexThe AI in the Lex writing and editing app points out cliches, passive voice, hedging (I think, probably, etc), missing citations, and repetition. It also lets you customize a writing issue to watch out for. You can also select a phrase you’re struggling with and Lex will suggest a rewrite option.Pricing: It’s free for basic use. Pay $12/month billed annually for full features.Alternatives: For additional edit options, I like pasting a clunky sentence into DeepL Write for alternative phrasing ideas. It now works with English, French, Spanish, and German. I use the free version, but you can upgrade for $11/month.🧪 If you like to experiment…I’m continually trying out new apps. Here are a few I’m looking at these days.* Butter Docs is a Google Docs alternative that lets you see your research as you write, with built-in space for notes and outlines.* Leaflet is a super simple, early version of a new writing app from the team behind Hyperlink, a collaborative space I like for group work online. Here’s a rough early example of a simple doc made with Leaflet.* Blaze is an AI tool that aims to simplify the process of drafting social content. A new feature lets you upload a podcast or video you recorded and convert it easily into a draft for other formats/platforms.* Letterloop enables collaborative newsletters for a family or friend group. ($5/month). It’s a creative way to build — or re-energize— a writing habit by collaborating with a small group of people you care about. Create a limited-run newsletter for family members or friends.* Alternatively, use Substack to make a free, private newsletter. Theme it around a milestone, project (“cooking experiments”) or whatever else interests you. A tiny, friendly audience can lower the stakes for experimentation. You choose the subject matter, style, and collaborators.p.s. You’re invited to join me for a talk I’m giving this Saturday, August 17 at 2pm ET as part of Medium Day—a free online conference. My 20-minute talk, followed by a short Q&A, is on “5 Tiny Steps for Super Busy People To Build a Writing Habit.” Register free for Medium Day. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Raindrop is a terrific free tool for organizing bookmarks. I use it to save links for classes I’m teaching and topics I’m researching. I also save link collections to share with friends, colleagues and readers.Read the online version of this story for links to all the tools mentioned. In this audio version I'll share its best features, suggested uses, caveats, and alternatives.Raindrop’s best featuresEasy and free on any platformDownload the Raindrop app for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, or any browser. Once you’ve installed the browser extension, it’s easy to save a link to any Web page and optionally add a note or tag for future reference. Bookmarks can have as many tags as you’d like for easy searching. Links you save can also be placed into a collection, which is basically a folder.Pricing: I recommend the free plan, which allows for unlimited links, collections, highlights, devices, public sharing, collaboration, and integrations. It has the primary features most people need and there’s no pressure to pay.Pro: The $3/month option ($28/annual) adds a few fancy features, including:* Find duplicate or broken links in your collection* Search the text of all sites you save* Preserve automatic copies of each Web page you save in case the original site goes offline* Upload 10GB of files each month to store your own files, images, PDFs, videos, etc.Share links and collaborate on collectionsAll your link collections are private, and you can share them at will. Display your links in a list, as cards in a gallery, or as a visual moodboard.* Add collaborators to a collection for a team or family project.* Publish collections of links that anyone can freely access without needing to use Raindrop or to sign up or register.* Embed link collections to host them on a website.Examples: Public link collections I’ve saved* Revenue streams for niche journalism ventures. A curated collection of ways to make money.* Pandemic-era online events platforms. A catalog of the flurry of apps that launched to help people gather online.Use AI to assist with organizing your linksA new AI organization tool helps with organizing your links. It will suggest a collection or tag for unsorted bookmarks, or a tag. That's especially helpful if, like me, you sometimes forget to tag or file what you save.Integrations: Automatically sync links across platformsYou can connect Raindrop to other services so you can access links you’ve saved later wherever and however you need them.* Raindrop can log links automatically to a Google spreadsheet or a Notion page. You don’t have to manually add them.* Sync links you save in Raindrop to Readwise, Instapaper or Pocket for reading later. You can also import links from those services to Raindrop.* Raindrop works well with IFTTT, Zapier, and Make, services that link together multiple apps. [Here’s my take on IFTTT’s usefulness]. Pairing one of those apps with Raindrop lets it automatically collect links to the songs you favorite on Spotify, Tweets you like, or videos you like on YouTube. There are more than 2600 total possible integrations. That makes Raindrop a useful hub for gathering and organizing all your favorite links from whatever services you use.Sponsored MessageToo many podcasts, too little time? Check out PodSnacks - The Blinkist for Podcasts!PodSnacks offers the most efficient way to keep up with your favorite podcasts.Select any podcast and receive an informative AI-generated summary of every new episode straight to your inbox. Never miss an update of the top tech, news, and business podcast again!Check Out PodSnacks!Export and importIt’s easy to import and export links with Raindrop.Export: Instead of dumping out your whole treasury of links, you can export just a relevant batch of links with a particular tag. Or export a link collection (folder). You can export the links as a CSV file for a spreadsheet, as an HTML file, or as text.Import: Import links you’ve saved easily from other services. Bring in links you’ve saved to browser, Evernote, or apps like Diigo, Dropmark, Goodlinks, etc.Sponsored MessageWordcab OneTranscription, speech intelligence, and summarization, all in your VPC. Wordcab One is the only voice stack built for private clouds. Automatic fine-tuning and unlimited custom dictionaries included. Find out more here💡 Suggested ways to use Raindrop📁 Organize project researchPark project materials in a Raindrop collection as you conduct research online. Save links into a neat Raindrop collection rather than printing out piles of paper or stuffing links into Word or GDocs. You can even annotate links as you go. It’s a simple, free, fast way to create a private or shared digital project file box.🧶 Gather and collaborate on hobbiesUse it to gather links with friends. If you're part of a club, team, hobby or fan group, you can collectively drop in your favorite links, with or without annotations.👩‍💻 Share resources for a presentation or workshopIf you teach or give talks, Raindrop is useful for sharing presentation links or resources. Share one link to a collection and attendees can see all your materials in one spot, including all your links, videos, and a PDF of your slides or handouts.Note: I usually prefer Craft for resource sharing after presentations because it allows me to create a complete visual document, rather than a resource list, but Raindrop works well when you’re mainly sharing links.🎨 Create a mood boardFor planning an event, party, or a renovation, Raindrop can be useful for saving inspiring images or links. The moodboard layout option gives you a nice visual view of your links with cover images. It also automatically pulls in the description from any link you save.Caveats* Mobile app visuals. Images in articles saved to Raindrop — particularly in paywall publications like the NYTimes — may not show all show when you read on the mobile app. I prefer to read saved articles in Readwise Reader (see alternatives below).* Packrats beware. As someone who saves more than I find time to consume, I confess to a digital packrat tendency. Adding yet another storage hub like this can lead you to overwhelm yourself with an avalanche of saved stuff that you lack time to review.* Avoid duplicate hubs. No need to add another digital sock drawer if your organization system already works well. If you have a well-established system in Notion, Coda, Airtable, Obsidian or somewhere else, stick to what’s working. Those platforms allow you to create your own custom organizational structure with advanced filtering.* Tiny team. Raindrop was envisioned, built, and managed by one person - Rustem Mussabekov, a 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan-based designer/developer. It’s been around for more than a decade, but its progress relies heavily on Rustem.Notable Alternatives* Readwise Reader is my preferred app for catching up with online reading on the subway or airplane. (Why I like it). If you’re mostly saving reading material, Readwise is well-designed for both online & offline reading & highlighting. Tip: It’s also good for watching + highlighting YouTube videos.* Instapaper, Pocket and Matter are also good options specifically designed for saving articles to read later, though none are ideal if you’re saving other kinds of links, like product pages or images.* MyMind is a much more visually appealing visual storage hub for saving materials online. Here’s why I find it useful.* Fabric is a new tool I’ve been testing for clipping notable material I find online. It’s aiming to create an AI-powered way to search all your materials.* Eagle just launched version 4.0. It’s best for saving and organizing images and screenshots you find online. Here’s what I like about Eagle.* Dropbox has a new feature to save links and screenshots. That’s useful for streamlined organization if all your files are already stored in Dropbox.What’s your preferred way to save and organize links? https://wondertools.substack.com/p/raindrop has the full post online This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

For the full, up-to-date post this audio connects to, visit https://wondertools.substack.com/p/notebooklm Google’s NotebookLM is a new free service that lets you apply AI to your own notes and documents. You can use it to find connections between your own ideas and see patterns you hadn’t noticed. Read on for how I’m using it, what I like most about it, its limitations, and interesting alternatives.How to start using NotebookLMSign up free at notebooklm.google.com Upload up to 20 documents into a collection of material you want to explore. You can add PDFs, Google Docs, or other materials you’ve either written yourself or gathered as part of your research. You can create multiple collections for different topics.Tip: I recommend creating separate collections for your own writings and for research that you’ve gathered from others. That way there will be clear demarcations between your own material and what comes from others.I have a collection about entrepreneurial journalism, for example, with a variety of notes and materials I’ve created over time. I’m building another one focused on the history of classical music, with articles, research and notes I’m gathering from others.What to use NotebookLM forAnalyze your own materialOnce you have a collection, NotebookLM creates asummary for each of the documents in it. It also add subject matter tags based on the content. Anytime you want to remember what’s in a particular document you’ve added to your collection, you can select it to see the AI-generated summary and the subject tags. You can then query a particular document, a subset of the documents in your collection, or the full collection. That’s helpful if you want to analyze material from a particular source that you’ve added, or just documents on a narrow subject.Suggested queriesNotebookLM will also suggest a few queries you can start with, based on its analysis of material you’ve uploaded. For example, in my collection of entrepreneurial journalism notes, it suggested queries about best practices for presenting startup projects.It suggested that because I had written extensively about presentation tactics in the documents I uploaded. When I clicked on that query, NotebookLM drew from various strands of materials in my notes and created a summary of some of my key points. To help me identify where it was sourcing the material in that summary, NotebookLM provided a a list of 10 citations from across the 9 documents I had uploaded thus far to that collection. I could click through to see those original sections it was drawing from to understand how the AI was sourcing its material. I could later add to the collection new materials.Ask your own questionsIn addition to using suggested queries that NotebookLM provides based on its analysis of your materials, you can pose any question you want. I could ask my own notes, for example, about the highest potential — and most challenging — revenue streams to pursue for those producing independent podcasts. Rather than searching across the Web, or digging into some an abstract AI predictive data model, as other AI tools do, NotebookLM scours its analysis of my own notes to pull together an answer and citations.While chat AI services like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are useful for a wide range of queries, your responses may be hard to trace back to any particular source unless you’re using a custom AI trained on your own material. That’s what’s most special about NotebookLM: you benefit from the power of AI applied specifically and narrowly to analysis of your own notes.Building on your own notesAfter querying NotebookLM you can save its responses and build on them to make new notes. If you’re preparing a presentation, a report, or analyzing trends or patterns, you can use NotebookLM as a partner in exploring your materials. You can have a dialogue with your own notes in a way that goes beyond searching for keywords or simply re-reading individual documents.Limitations* It’s not available to everyone yet. I can’t use it with my work account, only with my personal Gmail. It’s not open to people in all countries yet.* There’s no mobile app, though the mobile Web version works well for simple queries.* The design still feels a bit clunky to me. The interface includes multiple panels — one for your source documents and another for your queries, alongside various notes you save or create. Given that this is a new kind of tool, it may take some time for the service to shed clutter and provide a more streamlined view.* Google doesn’t train its models on your material, which remains private to you, but if you are skeptical about the company, you may not want to upload private material.Alternatives* Mem.ai is a tool for digital notes that also brings AI to your own materials.Unlike NotebookLM, which is free, Mem has a TK cost and works on TK platforms and unlike NotebookLM, is available everywhere CheckTK. When you start typing a note, its AI can helpfully surface related notes. And the helpful chat function lets you ask natural language questions to surface notes. I wrote about why Mem is like a next-generation Evernote. I don’t use it as my primary notes tool because the design and interface no longer appeals to me.* AnythingLLM is a promising new software tool you can download to create a private repository of material to analyze with AI on your own computer. I'm still testing and will be able to share more in the future on this. Final thoughtAI flavors are expanding. AI for multimedia, AI for search. What’s exciting about a new tool like NotebookLM is that you can apply AI with a narrow lens to your own material. What are your thoughts on this new direction for AI, how are you using it, or what other AI tools are you most excited about? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Summary: Strengthen your Google Slides with new templates that make presentations look better, plug-ins that add interactivity, and AI to help draft decks quickly. For even more polished presentations, pick from six of the best alternatives to GSlides. 🪩To see the full post and all the links, visit: https://wondertools.substack.com/p/7-ways-to-spice-up-google-slides 1. Turn your notes or writing into slides with AI 🤖SlidesAI can turn text into a Google Slides presentation draft. Paste in text, select a template style, then edit the generated presentation. Pricing: free for 3 presentations/month or $10/month for 10 monthly presentations.Compare: I converted a draft of a Medium post I’m working on into a presentations with Gamma, Beautiful.ai and SlidesAI. Bottom line: For higher-quality AI generation, use Gamma or Beautiful.ai.2. Add cool visuals with AI images 🌠Join Google's Workspace Labs to generate free images with Gemini AI inside Google Slides. Write a prompt and get four image options. Then pick your preferred style, such as photograph or sketch. See a gif of this.3. Make your slides interactive with polls + activities ❤️‍🔥Slido for Google Slides lets you insert live questions into a presentation. (See a video demo). Respondents can use a QR code to answer on their phone, or they can visit slido.com and use a code you show on your slide. When I present or teach online, I paste the poll link into the chat. My favorite poll type: word clouds for ice-breakers. (e.g. “What’s one word that describes your view on X”). Poll results update live on your slides. Here’s why Slido is my pick for polling.Poll Everywhere for Google Slides is another good interaction option. One of its cool features: people can respond to questions on your slides via SMS. Poll Everywhere also has a wider range of poll questions. You can ask people to annotate an image, for example.Nearpod for Google Slides is also useful for live interaction, and has a useful variety of activities for classes and workshops. It was designed for K-12 educators, but can work well in other settings as well.Pear Deck is a free add-on that’s great for teaching or leading workshops or meetings. People watching your presentation can answer questions on your slides or add annotations on their own screens. Here’s how and why to use it.4. Explore new designs with template galleries 👩‍💻Google Slides’s biggest limitations: a clunky editing interface and weak templates. Many feature small fonts and overemphasize bullet points. These lead novices to draft death-by-Powerpoint presentations overflowing with bullets and tiny text. Fortunately, there’s a vibrant ecosystem for well-designed free templates.Slides Carnival Try this timeline template or a good yellow-and-black explanatory theme, or this customizable Jeopardy game.* Slidesgo Use a dark, minimalist marketing template* Slidecore has a nice game show template, ala Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.* Slidesmania Start with a colorful, clean template or make a simple resume5. Jazz up your slides with apps 🎺Slides add-on apps in the Google Workspace Marketplace. Try these:* Creator Studio Export a gif or a video of your slide deck. Simple and free.* Unsplash Search for pro photos you can add free to your slides.* Noun Project Find icons that accentuate your message.* Slides Toolbox Add new features to Google Slides. e.g. Turn a collection of photos into slides, or convert a Google Doc into a slide deck.6. Try these advanced tricks ♠️🎛️ Blend your slide decks While working on a slide deck, you can import slides from any deck you’ve ever created in Google Slides. Copy over an entire deck or individual slides. Mix and match as you would playlist songs. 🎶🔗 Link slides Create master slides for oft-used company stats, quotes, team members or metrics. Insert those master slides as linked slides into other presentations. Then, whenever you update one of these linked master slides, it’s updated everywhere. So you don’t have to update the same information in every single slide deck separately. Here’s how. Most other slide tools don't enable this.🤳 Present from your phone. Android & iOS versions of Google Slides let you present online or with a projector via AirPlay or Chromecast. Alternatively share a link to your slides or download a PDF.↕️ Go vertical Change the slide canvas dimensions to make a handout or poster.7. Check out these public Google Slides presentations 👀Heystack curates notable public Google Slides decks, including:* Mr. Beast, a Creator Breakdown — Not a pretty deck, but informative* Remote Work Starter Kit — Well-designed, with useful frameworks* Data & Narratives — 101 slides with insights about data visualization* The ChatGPT Prompt Book — A guide with examples for mastering ChatGPT* Out of Office — Explaining the origins and impacts of Internet memes* Jason’s Machine Learning 101 — a now-classic explanatory resourceGot a Google Slides trick, tip or tool? Leave a comment 👇The 6 best alternatives to Google Slides* Gamma is the best new presentation tool. I’m writing a full post on it soon.* Pitch has a terrific array of professional templates. Why I use it so much.* Beautiful.ai is excellent for visual slides and charts. I like these features.* Typeset is fun to use and gives you flexibility to focus on slides’ design.* Canva has the richest library of visual elements for sprucing up slides. Check out my collection of Canva posts.* iA Presenter is superb for converting scripts into slides. Why it’s unique. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Summary: AI outputs can be disappointingly conventional. To avoid predictable responses, I like instructing AI engines to be strange. Unexpected, radical ideas can be useful for creative inspiration. Odd perspectives stretch my thinking. Read on for specific ways to prompt AI to break beyond its bland boundaries. For the full post online, with visuals, visit: https://wondertools.substack.com/p/surprising-ways-to-prompt-ai Give me strange and surprising feedbackWhen I’m in a creative rut, I paste in a section of writing and prompt AI to be bold and unconventional:* “Offer five surprising, unexpected suggestions for specific ways to improve the following piece of writing. Along with each suggestion, include a detailed, creative explanation with the rationale for the observation.”* “Act as an unpredictable, brilliant writing coach who offers strange, bold, creative suggestions. Provide specific, granular input.”* “Detail novel topic ideas or peculiarly provocative questions I could answer to help me disrupt the conventionality or predictability of the following outline I've begun.”* “Point out blindspots that others with radically different perspectives from mine on this subject might identify if they were to read this work with a critical eye. Include examples of ways in which these could be remedied.”Create a bold, unexpected image for meTo create distinctive illustrations I rely on DALL-E 3, an image generator included with my $20 monthly ChatGPT plus subscription. It understands natural language, so I don’t have to master prompting lingo to get results that surprise me.* Tip: Prompt for wide images. Those tend to look better than square images when laid out in newsletters, blog posts and other wide-format pages.Good free alternatives for creative imagery* Microsoft’s Designer lets you generate distinctive images for free, with the same DALL-E 3 engine a ChatGPT subscription offers. You get four images to choose from each time you write a prompt, increasing the likelihood at least one will suit you.* Adobe Firefly is also useful for envisioning wild images. You can alternatively use it to edit existing images. You can select part of an image you want to change and explain what you’d like instead.10 odd AI prompts to get radically new results * Propose 5 questions a reader would be surprised to find answered on [your topic X] * What are 3 quirky, unusual analogies to explain [your phenomenon of interest]. Here’s an example prompt and result.* Who are 7 surprising, odd historical figures to cite as examples of [X]. For each individual include a detailed explanation. Here’s an example.* What rarely discussed, counterintuitive insights on the subject of [X] might startle readers accustomed to bland observations? * Give me 5 lively, colorful, unusual words to use in a description of [X]? * Provide 3 extreme, surprising examples of [X] or silly, ridiculous instances.* Share 5 counterintuitive ways to address situation [X] * Imagine I shocked people with a one sentence answer to the following question: [X]. Give me 10 versions of that one-sentence reply. * I have [X challenge] in [Y situation]. Assume I want to surprise people with a wildly creative solution. Describe three solutions that would stun people while addressing the root of the issue. * For a syllabus I’m creating on [X], imagine seven radically different people teaching the same course. Provide three bullet points representing each teacher, explaining the surprising and distinct learning outcomes each would aim for in their version of the class. How to make the most of these provocative promptsStep 1: Pick an AI chat tool to experiment with: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Microsoft Copilot.Step 2: Initiate a new chat by typing in a role for the AI to adopt for the prompt you’re going to give it. For example: “Act as a bold, experienced, expert who provides distinctive, unusual perspectives to push my thinking in creative new directions.”Step 3: Pick one of the unusual AI prompt templates above and adapt it to fit the specifics of your own work.Step 4: After you get an initial response, write a follow-up prompt to build on the first result. That iteration allows you to tailor subsequent answers. Consider asking for even more radical suggestions, or for more depth on a particular detail. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Summary: Bloks is simple AI-powered software I use and recommend to record and summarize meetings. Read on for how it works, how to make the most of Bloks, and a few limitations and alternatives. If you’re a visual person, watch my 4-minute video summary above or on YouTube. How Bloks worksBloks runs on your computer, transcribing and summarizing online or in-person meetings. Unlike other meeting recorders or summary tools, it’s not a bot that joins your meetings. Bloks acts like a small recorder on your computer, so it doesn’t have to be invited or admitted by a meeting host.Wonder Tools is a reader-supported publication. Join 35k tech-curious readers & become a free or paid subscriber.Prepare for your dayIn advance of your meetings, Bloks can brief you on those with whom you’re meeting. After you link Bloks to your calendar, it looks up public info on people you’re meeting with. You then get a summary of the person’s background and focus areas, drawn from LinkedIn. (This functions a bit like another tool I wrote about, Clay). Bloks also suggests potentially relevant questions to ask. For people you’ve already met with, Bloks will draw on previous conversations to give you relevant recent context.Upcoming improvements to briefs: * The Bloks team says they plan to strengthen briefs by drawing on additional sources of info you have access to, like your organization’s customer relationship management software.* Bloks also plans to tailor briefs to show relevant recent action items for colleagues you meet with regularly, rather than repeatedly showing their background info.Streamline your dayDuring meetings: Bloks auto-transcribes and summarizes any online meeting you join. You can add manual notes, or just rely on the AI summary. Alternatively, you can manually turn Bloks on or off.After meetings: Bloks gives you a bulleted summary you can share with meeting participants. It also gives you suggested action items to follow-up on. It even shows you relevant email threads if you give Bloks access to your email. As you work: You can use Bloks’ AI chat function to query individual meetings or your whole notebook. You can review a topic or query an ongoing series of meetings you’ve had with colleagues. How I use AI queries: I’m forgetful, so I like asking Bloks to refresh my memory about various decisions and discussions. For example, I recently prompted it to “summarize my recent discussions about Reddit for research” and “summarize the video repository discussion and decision.” Both responses were instantaneous, detailed and useful. You can also record your own thoughts with Bloks and ask it to draft an email or LinkedIn post, along the lines of how I use Oasis. Why I delegate meeting notes to BloksI used to take detailed meeting notes, but I now try to focus on closer listening. With Bloks, I can delegate summary notes to AI. Knowing I’ll have a good summary and a full transcript allows me to be more present and engaged.How to use Bloks to summarize a meeting Step 1. After downloading the software, set Bloks to launch automatically anytime you join an online meeting. If you prefer, set it to require that you manually hit record. Step 2. The next time you join an online meeting, Bloks will automatically launch and start transcribing. If you’ve opted for a manual start, just hit record whenever you want. Tip: Because Bloks isn’t visible to other meeting participants, ask if it’s OK for you to create an AI transcript of the meeting. Also ask if others would like a summary afterwards. Almost no one refuses, and it’s often appreciated. Step 3. A transcript of the full meeting is available immediately afterwards. A summary follows moments later. It usually features five to 10 sections summarizing the primary meeting topics. Each section has a few bullet points to remind you of key points. The bottom of the summary includes follow-up actions. Note: Bloks doesn’t save audio or video, it just uses the meeting audio to generate a transcript that the AI summarizes. If you need audio or video recordings, consider one of the alternative tools below.  Step 4. You can copy and paste the summary into an email or any other notes tool you use. Or use the AI chat for a follow-up prompt, such as “what were the three reasons she had for recommending the new vendor?”Why I like sharing and reviewing meeting summariesIf you have 15 or more meetings a week, it’s easy to lose track of a secondary point noted in one of them. Because Bloks lets you easily share summary notes, everyone can have a simple shared record of what was discussed. I’ve found this helps prevent later confusion about what was agreed upon. It also helps me prep for follow-up meetings, particularly when there’s a long gap between them.  A magical way to engage with all your meeting notesOnce you’ve recorded some meetings or made manual notes in Bloks, you can benefit from its intelligence. You can use AI to search through your repository of notes for themes, topics, or specific issues related to your meetings. If you link your email to Bloks, it will soon be able to find patterns and insights from not just your live meetings, but also from your email correspondence. That will enable you to query for all sorts of insights. How to “Ask Bloks” for AI insights* When you’re reflecting on your work with someone over the past year, you can ask Bloks to summarize your collaborations and pull up highlights from your conversations. * When considering the activity of a committee or meeting group over time, you can ask Bloks to summarize its key activities, accomplishments or unfinished tasks. * If you make your own notes in Bloks, you can ask it to summarize your thinking on a subject, draw connections between multiple ideas or projects you’ve detailed, or suggest follow-up actions. More of what I like about Bloks* Bloks can transcribe in-person meetings. That yields summaries of your one-on-one discussions, with the permission of your colleagues. It also can summarize a conference session or lecture. Example: I recently used it at a conference to record a session so I could focus on listening and trying out the ideas shared. Despite not taking manual notes, I left with a summary that I could share with the speaker. * Set it and forget it. I like being able to use Bloks' AI without having to summon it or query it all the time. It’s set to auto-record so I don’t have to think about it until and unless I want to check out a meeting summary or query it on something I’m considering. “I appreciate Bloks' auto-on feature,” Rodney Gibbs told me recently. “Before I implemented that, I often forgot to start the note-taking until a few minutes into the meeting,” said Gibbs, a journalism product consultant. “Now I just trust that it'll be taking notes for my meetings.”* It’s privacy friendly. You can turn it off or on whenever you want, and it doesn’t store audio or video, or send your private info to train AI models. Check out its privacy policy. Caveats * Manual note-taking isn’t as robust as it is with other tools. You can’t edit notes to look nice like you can with note-taking tools like Craft, Notion, Bear or other such services. * Customization options for summaries are limited. You may prefer a longer or shorter style summary and you can't really control that.* Export and import functions aren’t robust or customizable. It’s easy to copy-paste individual notes or transcripts, but not easy to import or export big batches of notes directly to or from other systems.  * Bloks may overemphasize or misinterpret certain aspects of discussions, as with any AI tool. For example, If you're talking about the weather for a couple of minutes, it may add a summary of your discussion about the weather as one of the primary topics of your meeting. You may prefer your notes to focus primarily on the substantive part of your meetings. I don’t consider that a major flaw. In general, I’ve found the quality of the summaries to be similar to other AI meeting summarization tools. * Bloks sometimes suggests action items that aren’t relevant or don’t reflect actual commitments made during a meeting.PricingBloks was free during its beta period, but as of February, 2024 the free plan is more restrictive. Unlimited access to Bloks now costs $19/month on an annual license. AlternativesMeeting summarization services are now plentiful, though most don’t offer the full Bloks feature set. Instead, they focus on letting you customize the summaries or view and share video highlights . Here are a few great options: Supernormal creates excellent meeting summaries, and lets you pick or customize a template for investor meetings, user research or other common meetings you have. That’s helpful if you want your meeting summaries to be consistently structured. Supernormal isn’t designed to link to your email, though, or to enable queries across your meetings. Pricing: Free for up to 10 meetings a month, then $10 to $19/month depending on features.4149 is a creative AI meeting summarization tool that doesn’t require you to download or install any software. It also doesn’t train its AI models off of your transcripts or data. After a meeting you’ve invited its AI bot to attend, 4149 shares a Google Doc with you with a one-page summary. It’s more playful than other services, so sometimes it includes a poem about your meeting. 4149 does a good job of answering questions you ask it about your meetings. For example, I like asking it about a meeting’s most notable quotes. But it's not designed for connecting to your notes, contacts or other elements of your workflow, as Bloks is. One neat feature in development: having the AI send you follow-up info on topics you discussed. Pricing: Free while in beta. Fathom is great for video recording of meetings. It helpfully provides time-coded links to summary moments from your meeting so you can jump to certain parts of a recording afterwards. A handy feature: Fathom has annotation buttons you can use during a meeting to mark a highlight or annotate something to return to later. Pricing Free for individuals, or $24-$29/month per person for teams.Rewind can be used to summarize meetings, but it’s also designed to give you a private record of everything on your screen. That makes it handy for finding anything you’ve looked at. But not everyone will be comfortable with it running persistently in the background. Unlike Bloks, Rewind generally runs all the time, even when you’re not in meetings, so you can remember other things you work on — though you can customize what it captures and stores. Pricing: Free for basic use, or $19 for pro features.Partner MessageStay ahead of the tech curve with KnowTechie’s Weekly Download, a tech newsletter for the everyday tech and gadget lover. Join over 10,000+ readers who enjoy our weekly digest of the latest gadgets, apps, and technology trends. Subscribe for free today.Catch up with recent Wonder Tools posts: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Kapwing is an excellent Web-based video editing tool. Its useful new AI features make it easy to convert a long video — like a Zoom recording, an interview, or a presentation— into short, shareable clips. Watch the video above — or on YouTube — to see Kapwing’s co-founder and CEO show me how to do that. Read on for how and why to easily create video clips with Kapwing’s AI, and some limitations and alternatives. Make social video clips with AIThe Kapwing feature I find most useful is Repurpose Studio. Video editing with Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro can be time consuming. If you’re creating short video clips for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn, Kapwing and other new tools like Veed are easier and more efficient. Video demo: Watch an excerpt from my interview with Kapwing’s CEO for her 1-minute overview of how to use AI to create social video clips from a long video. How to create video clips with KapwingStep 1. Go to Kapwing’s Repurpose Studio. It’s a simplified special section of Kapwing’s Web-based video editor. Upload a video recording, like a 20-minute presentation or a 60-minute Zoom recording. Step 2. Wait a few minutes for processing. Kapwing uses AI to analyze the transcript for engaging material. It then suggests several clips, usually about a minute each. Preview the clips and pick one(s) you like. Step 3. Pick your preferred aspect ratio (wide or tall) depending on whether you’re planning to publish clips on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. Optionally tweak the visual style of the captions. Step 4. Export a clip you like, then upload it to a social platform like YouTube. Step 5. Optional: Open Kapwing’s full video editor to make additional changes to a clip before exporting it. You can adjust a clip’s start or end point to alter its length. You can also trim the video by deleting words, sentences or even whole sections from the AI-generated transcript.  Step 6: Optional: Remove background noise. This step is crucial if you don’t have a dedicated microphone or if you’re uploading a noisy Zoom or conference recording. Descript is best for noise removal (see my fuller take), but Kapwing’s audio cleanup is also good.What to use Repurpose Studio for: Recordings people are unlikely to rewatch in full, like long panels or conference presentations. Clips can convey highlights efficiently. Normally, the editing would take hours. Now it can take minutes. What not to use it for: This won’t work well for silent videos or music videos. Caveats* Kapwing doesn’t yet upload directly to social or video platforms, so you have to export your video to your computer and then upload it to share.* For pro video editing features like keyframes, which let you add an effect to a video frame by frame, Kapwing isn’t as powerful as Final Cut Pro from Apple or Adobe Premiere.* AI transcription isn’t perfect. You’ll have to edit misunderstood words. In this post’s video, for example, “Kapwing” was transcribed occasionally as “Kipping” or “Kapling.” * Kapwing doesn’t yet generate video descriptions or chapter timecodes like Veed (see below), and it doesn’t yet suggest or create thumbnails. Hopefully in the future. Create a video in multiple languagesIf you’ve ever dreamed of being able to speak a new language, you might appreciate Kapwing’s AI dubbing. Record yourself in your native tongue. Then pick a language to dub yourself into. Video excerpt: Kapwing’s CEO on how AI enables translating your voice Kapwing lets you clone your own voice or use an AI-generated voice to narrate your video. The tech is from ElevenLabs, which has the leading voice AI models. You can then dub your video so it sounds like you (or an AI model) speaking any of 76 languages. You can also include translated captions. More on dubbing: Kapwing’s overview page and 3-minute how-to video. Caveats: Kapwing’s AI requires a paid subscription. It doesn’t yet work for group conversations. The advanced video editing interface can be overwhelming for novices at first. Expect translation glitches, as with any AI translation tool. Other AI features in KapwingYou can use AI in Kapwing to generate a video script, turn a script into a video, generate a meme, create a slideshow, generate an image, or turn an article or document into a video like this one, which I created by pasting in the text of this post into Kapwing’s AI video generator. PricingKapwing is free to test out to edit videos up to four minutes long, but they’ll have a watermark and be limited to 720p quality. And AI features are restricted, notably voice translation. It costs $192/year for full features, including AI capabilities. Educators and students can apply to use Kapwing for free.Partner MessageVolv is an app for high-performing individuals. It curates interesting content across the internet and delivers it in 9-second articles using AI so you can be updated without doom scrolling on social media. It's been featured on the Apple App Store and read by 60k+ users globally. Check it out for freeAlternatives: good AI-powered video editing toolsVeed is an excellent Web-based video editing tool with a simpler interface, similar pricing, and helpful AI features. It can auto-generate a YouTube video description and chapters. I’m planning a future post about Veed. Descript is a great tool for editing not just video, but also audio. AI features allow you to identify useful clips to share and remove background noise. Descript’s filler word removal feature seems to work a bit better than that of Kapwing. Hypernatural is a brand new useful AI-powered editing tool specifically for generating short video clips from audio or Zoom meetings. It uses AI to generate images suited to your audio, yielding short shareable video clips like this. Captions is an AI video editing tool that’s excellent for automated, cool-looking captions. You can also use it to translate videos of up to 5 minutes in your own dubbed voice. I’ve tried the iPhone, Web and Mac apps — Android is coming soon. Read more about the app: 👇I used Captions’ Mac app to clone my voice and translate my 90-second video about AI for educators. See how it turned out: versions in English🇺🇸; Italian 🇮🇹; Japanese🇯🇵; German🇩🇪; and Hindi🇮🇳. What do you think? Lipdub is a related free app from Captions.ai. Record short clips in one language and translate them into another. This 30-second demo video shows someone using Lipdub’s AI to simulate speaking a dozen languages. What’s your take on AI for video editing? Leave a comment 👇Update: Last week I wrote about one of my favorite survey tools, Tally. Here’s a quick summary of some of my initial takeaways from your responses to my survey asking for feedback on Wonder Tools: * A majority of readers who responded were in favor of me including more videos and, where relevant, including step-by-step guidance on tools. * There was also support for curated items, and for inviting occasional guest writers. If you’re interested in writing a guest post, reply to this post.* You had a great range of topic suggestions. I’ll draw on your ideas this year, noting your interest in AI and productivity tools. * I appreciate your input! It’s helpful as I plan for the year ahead. The feedback survey remains open so please still share your feedback! Thanks! p.s. Do you have your own project? This is the final week for applications to the 100-day online CUNY course I lead. Watch our open house video or visit the program page and apply. This is a public episode. 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Explore the transformative power of ChatGPT in everyday tasks. Discover how to harness AI for enhanced creativity and productivity, from brainstorming to editing. Learn effective prompting techniques with the POP framework to get relevant responses. Understand when to use alternatives like Claude, Bing, and Bard. Dive into practical applications that can revolutionize your workflow. Whether in journalism or content creation, it's all about maximizing technology to enhance your output.