Whether you specialize in data entry, social media management, graphic design, real estate, or any other area, you need proper tools at your disposal for effective virtual assistance—and among these tools are AI (artificial intelligence) productivity apps. These platforms are powered by machine learning algorithms, making them powerful, dynamic, and useful for all kinds of applications.
Image Credit: Santiaga/istockphoto.
Otter
Otter offers a handy AI assistant that helps with transcription and note-taking tasks. It can automatically join your Google Meet or Microsoft Teams meetings to take notes while you do other tasks.
If you have long meetings, Otter can generate short summaries, helping you understand what other team members discussed so you can collaborate more smoothly. Its ability to transcribe and take notes makes it suitable for not only virtual assistants, but also sales teams, students, marketing professionals, and recruitment teams.
Features:
- Plan. You can add Otter to your calendar events to allow it to automatically connect to planned meetings and take notes in real time, even if you can’t make it.
- Advanced capture. Otter takes notes and captures audio at specific time stamps, giving you more context of what happened in the meeting.
- Integrated chat. Team members can use Otter to review previous meetings and discuss various points.
- Autosummarize. Otter generates summaries automatically, saving you from having to review lengthy meeting notes.
- Integrated generative AI. Otter can also boost your productivity by generating blog posts, social media posts, and follow-up emails.
- Multiple integrations. Otter is compatible with major video conferencing apps, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.
Pricing: (billed annually)
- Basic plan is free but with limited features
- Pro plan is $10 per user per month
- Business plan is $20 per user per month
- Enterprise is available for a custom price quote
Image Credit: Otter.
Fireflies
Fireflies helps you automate your workflow by analyzing voice conversations and transcribing content. It can also summarize important information, allowing you to keep track of key moments. Fireflies integrates with many popular video apps like Google Meet, Aircall, RingCentral, and Webex Teams.
Features:
- AI-powered search. Fireflies’ integrated AI helps you review lengthy meetings and find important information quickly. You can even apply filters on specific topics, and the app will point to when team members discussed the topic in the meeting.
- Integrated comments. Fireflies lets you add comments to your meeting notes and share them with your colleagues using collaboration apps like Asana and Notion.
- Conversation intelligence. You can track a speaker’s talk time and monologues, and even measure their sentiment. It also supports setting topic trackers, allowing you to analyze your team’s response to various issues.
- Supported voice commands. Fireflies allows you to create tasks in linked apps like Asana, Slack, and Trello using voice commands during your meetings.
- Central knowledge base. Fireflies stores all your conversations in one place, allowing you to find important information for reference easily.
- Custom privacy controls. You can set which part of the meeting notes should be visible to other team members.
Pricing: (all billed annually)
- Free forever plan has limited features
- Pro plan is $10 per seat per month
- Business plan is $19 per seat per month
- Enterprise plan is $39 per seat per month
Image Credit: fireflies.ai.
Zoom AI Companion
Zoom AI Companion assists you in summarizing meetings and chat threads with artificial intelligence. It can also help you in drafting emails and chat messages, enhancing your productivity in the process.
Recently, Zoom experienced backlash after it proposed to use user data to train its AI systems. The company has since abandoned that plan, providing more transparency on how it handles customer data.
Features:
- Smart recordings. With Zoom AI Companion, you can divide your meeting recordings into different categories based on specific topics.
- AI companion. Whenever you join a meeting late, you can chat with the integrated AI Companion, which will update you on what you missed.
- Multilingual support. Zoom AI Companion can generate meeting summaries in 36 languages.
- Generative AI. You can create action items, email subject lines, and other content using Zoom’s AI Companion.
- Auto share. Zoom AI Companion lets you generate and share meeting notes with other team members easily.
Pricing: (billed annually)
- Basic plan is free but has limited features
- Pro plan is $13.33 per user per month
- Business plan is $18.33 per user per month
- Business Plus plan is $22.49 per user per month
- Enterprise plan is available for a custom price quote
Image Credit: Zoom AI Companion.
ChatGPT
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can help perform various tasks, from creating blog posts to summarizing articles, writing code, and more. It accepts user input, processes it to determine what you want, and generates meaningful content.
What’s more, ChatGPT can keep track of context, allowing it to provide natural conversational experiences. Its revolutionary features enabled it to gain over a million users within just five days after launch.
Features:
- Multilingual support. Though ChatGPT’s training data is predominantly in English, it can still produce content in other languages, including Spanish, German, and French.
- Real-time interaction. You can interact with ChatGPT and get back responses in real time.
- Multimodal capabilities. In the early versions, you could only interact with ChatGPT using text messages. Later updates are introducing support for voice interactions.
- Simple interface. ChatGPT features an intuitive interface, which can be easily used by people with varying skill levels.
- Custom GPTs. Beyond basic interactions, ChatGPT can be customized with GPTs (generative pretrained transformers) tailored to specific industries or tasks, providing highly relevant and specialized responses.
Pricing:
- ChatGPT is free to use
- ChatGPT Plus has extra features and performance enhancement and is $20 per month
Image Credit: ChatGPT.
Gemini
Gemini (formerly Google Bard) is a generative AI tool designed to enhance productivity across various tasks. It streamlines content creation, allowing users to effortlessly produce material in their desired tone and voice.
Beyond content, Gemini offers robust support for tackling mathematical and programming challenges. It’s also a helpful companion for creative tasks, capable of drafting poems, songs, stories, and more. This makes Gemini an invaluable tool for workflow optimization, managing complex tasks, and unlocking new creative potential, significantly boosting overall productivity.
Features:
- Multimodal. It can process and generate different types of information, including code, text, image, and synthetic data.
- Contextual understanding. Using natural language processing and neural networks, Gemini can keep track of context and provide accurate answers.
- Intuitive. Like ChatGPT, Gemini also features a user-friendly interface, so it easily fits into your workflow.
- Multilingual. Gemini can process text, transcribe, translate, or generate content in more than 40 languages.
Pricing:
- Gemini is free to use
- Gemini Advanced is $19.99 per month
Image Credit: Gemini.
Grammarly
Grammarly is an advanced grammar, tone, plagiarism, and style checker. In other words, it helps to keep your writing in check. It also provides useful insights as you write, which helps boost your productivity.
This writing tool can also assist you in rephrasing, rewriting, lengthening, or shortening content. And with the integrated generative AI capability, you can quickly produce high-quality content from text inputs, which you can review and use.
Features:
- Compatibility. You can use Grammarly in many applications, including Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The Google Chrome installation lets you access Grammarly on various web pages, including when writing emails using Gmail.
- Custom voice. Whether you need a more formal, professional, or casual tone, Grammarly can generate content that aligns with your goals.
- Formatting. It can generate ideas on how to format content for better readability.
- Find ideas. Grammarly helps you generate ideas, structure, and outlines, jumpstarting your writing process.
- Email summarizer. Grammarly can analyze your emails and extract key points, saving you time.
- Citations. Grammarly analyzes your writing and keeps your citations consistent. This feature is especially helpful for writing academic and research papers or journals.
- AI prompts. Apart from analyzing your writing automatically, you can customize Grammarly’s actions further by submitting prompts.
Pricing: (billed annually)
- Free plan offers 100 AI prompts per month
- Premium is $12 per month
- Business is $15 per member per month
- Enterprise plan available via custom quote
Image Credit: grammarly.com.
Clara
Clara is a virtual assistant that helps schedule your meetings. To get started, you have to integrate Clara with your email. Clara will then generate automated schedules and send them to other team members.
Once meetings are finalized, Clara will send invite links and add the meetings to your calendar. However, the app is still in beta, so its features and functionality are still uncertain.
Features:
- Automatic follow-ups. Clara automatically sends follow-up messages, keeping your meetings on schedule.
- Natural language processing (NLP). With underlying machine learning algorithms and neural networks, Clara can generate messages in natural language and send them to colleagues.
- 24/7 monitoring. Clara can automatically monitor specific aspects of your workflow, allowing you to focus more on creative work.
Pricing:
- Clara is still in beta, so pricing information isn’t available yet.
Image Credit: Clara.
Layla
Planning an itinerary can be time-consuming, especially when visiting a new area. Layla, formerly Roam Around, eases this process by generating recommendations based on interests, hobbies, and target location.
Layla can also help you find suitable hotels and flights in a travel area, according to your budget. Its partnership with booking.com and Skyscanner lets you access even more functionalities like finding affordable accommodations.
Features:
- AI prediction. Layla will predict flight prices depending on the travel location and help find the cheapest rates.
- Exploration. It can help find must-see attractions, monuments, artworks, and more in the preferred location.
- Multimodal. Apart from text, Layla also generates pictures of various destinations, allowing you to have a glimpse of the area.
- Save chats. You can save your chats and itineraries—and access them later.
- Shareable links. Layla generates links that you can use to share your itinerary with friends and colleagues.
Pricing:
- Layla is available for free
Image Credit: Layla.
ClickUp Brain
ClickUp Brain focuses on project management and task automation. It offers multiple functionalities in one package, including writing content, managing work and updates, and retrieving information. ClickUp Brain also helps you with planning, so your workflow proceeds smoothly.
Features:
- AI writing assistant. It helps you generate content in your desired tone, voice, and style. This includes synthetic data, templates, and transcripts.
- AI search. ClickUp Brain uses its machine learning algorithms to quickly sift through large datasets and find the specific information you’re looking for.
- Voice and video transcription. ClickUp Brain can also generate transcripts from audio and video files.
- Prebuilt templates. You can access hundreds of premade, customizable templates.
Pricing:
- Forever plan is free
- Unlimited plan is $5 per month
Image Credit: ClickUp Brain.
Zapier
Whether in marketing, customer support, or any other department, Zapier allows for automation between many apps. For example, you can add AI integrations to your workflow to summarize content, personalize blog posts, and more. It supports numerous apps like ChatGPT, Cody, and Chatsonic.
Features:
- Wide range of libraries. Zapier’s robust ecosystem offers different AI-powered tools and integrates them into your workflow.
- Premade templates. Zapier provides different templates to help you get started with your automation journey. You also have the option of creating your own from scratch.
- Drag-and-drop interface: You can create powerful task management automations with the drag-and-drop editor.
Pricing: (billed annually)
- Free version has limited features
- Professional is $19.99 per month
- Team is $69 per month
- Company edition available via custom quote
Image Credit: Zapier.
How to choose the right AI tool for your needs
With so many AI tools available, you need to select the ones that will help you achieve your unique goals. We offer some tips for finding the right ones:
- Assess your needs and requirements, then determine if each tool has the right features to suit them.
- Consider the tool’s pricing structure to avoid going over budget.
- Consider how the tool collects and uses personal information.
- Ensure the tool can scale to accommodate future growth.
- Determine if the tool supports the level of customization you need.
- Check if the tool is compatible with other platforms in your workspace.
Image Credit: Jacob Wackerhausen/istockphoto.
Tips for maximizing AI productivity as a virtual assistant
Once you’ve found the right AI apps, consider the following tips to maximize AI productivity:
- Use AI to automate content creation in your workflow for effective time management.
- Integrate AI tools with other software to take advantage of all available capabilities.
- Embrace continuous learning to adapt to AI advancements.
- Adjust the AI productivity app’s settings to fit your needs.
- Use concise, detailed prompts, so AI tools can perform tasks more effectively.
- Train other team members to help them benefit as well.
- Fact-check AI content before using it for decision-making.
- Take advantage of Android and iOS mobile apps to access AI functionalities in different environments.
This article originally appeared on Upwork.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
Image Credit: Ridofranz/istockphoto.
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