Find the right tool

Every tool gets the same review: what it's best at, where it fails, what it means for your privacy and your coursework.

• ChatGPT: A general-purpose assistant for drafting, explaining, analyzing files and thinking out loud.
• Claude: Long documents, careful writing and reasoning through problems step by step.
• Gemini: An assistant that lives inside Google Docs, Gmail, Drive and Search.
• Microsoft Copilot: AI inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.
• Perplexity: Quick answers with links to the sources behind them.
• NotebookLM: Studying from your own sources: readings, lecture notes and slides.
• GitHub Copilot: Code suggestions and a coding agent inside your editor.
• Cursor: An AI-first code editor for building whole features with an agent.
• Claude Code: An agent that reads your project, runs commands and makes changes from the terminal or IDE.
• Midjourney: Striking, stylized images from text prompts.
• Runway: Generating and editing video with AI.
• Gamma: A first-draft slide deck, document or webpage from an outline.
• ElevenLabs: Natural-sounding voiceover, dubbing and speech-to-text.
• Zapier: Connecting apps and adding AI steps to routine workflows, no code needed.
• n8n: Building your own AI agents and automations, visually, with full control.
• Elicit: Finding papers and extracting findings into a table for literature reviews.
• SciSpace: Reading hard papers and running a first-pass literature review in one place.
• Consensus: Asking a research question and seeing what the peer-reviewed literature says, with sources.
• Scite: Seeing whether later papers support or dispute a paper before you cite it.
• ResearchRabbit: Mapping a field from a few seed papers and finding what you missed.
• Semantic Scholar: Free academic search with one-line paper summaries and an AI-assisted reader.
• Grammarly: Catching errors and tightening your own writing everywhere you type.
• QuillBot: Rephrasing a sentence you're stuck on, and checking grammar and citations.
• Julius: Analyzing a spreadsheet by asking questions in plain language.
• Otter: Live transcripts and summaries of lectures, interviews and meetings.
• Canva: Designing slides, posters and social graphics quickly, with AI help.
• Napkin: Turning a paragraph into a diagram you can edit.
• Adobe Firefly: Generating and editing images inside Adobe apps, with clearer commercial-use terms.
• Descript: Editing video and podcasts by editing the transcript.
• Replit: Building and hosting a small app in the browser, with an AI agent doing the setup.