My most used apps have “AI” inside

At present, these are my most used web/desktop/mobile apps.

  • Readwise: Save, read, comment, remark, and share. I couldn’t ask more for this Pocket and Instapaper replacement. 
  • Lex.Page: is my new Google Docs.* 
  • MacWhisper: I use this to capture all the audio on my conference calls. It transcribes and creates notes for future reference. 
  • Sudowrite: Shhh, this is my creative co-pilot. **
  • Descript: I am working on doing podcasts. This is a good way to get a better handle on the audio, and hopefully get good at this whole “podcast” malarky. 
  • Poe: My AI playground. Really, just a place where I go to do work, but mostly to waste my time with various AI bots. 
  • Feedbin: Not just my RSS reader, but also a place for me to aggregate my newsletters.
  • Arc Internet: The best browser on the market right now. Fast, clever, and none of the Chrome-crud. 
  • Photoshop: Firefly and other AI tools have turned this into a must-use app for me as a photographer. 
  • MacGPT: OpenAI, except on my desktop. 

Honorable Mentions:  Topaz Labs AI & Google Labs’ (AI Search.)

Legacy Apps & Services that I still use a lot: Apple Mail, Apple Music (Classical), Plex, VLC, Twitter, Safari, and Apple Notes. Frankly, they all need some AI-Botox ASAP!

Quick Thoughts: Apart from #7, all of them have “AI.” Except #10, all of them have a workflow built around “AI.” The same goes for Topaz & Google Labs (AI Search.) Google Labs’ experiments with search are much better than Perplexity, which I am told is raising even more money at extremely high valuations. 

The point is that we all like to talk about AI, but ultimately it is all about what AI can do for me. It is about the “workflows” and how they make me productive, efficient, and faster. They are not about replacing me and my skills, but instead, they are augmenting my capabilities. As I have said before, AI means “augmented intelligence.”

What else should I try? Do you have any suggestions? 

Nostalgia is a curse in life and tech.

Disclosures: * Lex is funded by True Ventures, where I am “partner emeritus.” ** Sudowrite is run by two close friends. I have an indirect investment in the startup.

Technology
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Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

9 thoughts on this post

  1. Hmmm, Sudowrite looks very interesting. I’ll have to try it.

    But Photoshop? Have you tried LightRoom instead, especially LrC? The current incarnation has AI masks that are very powerful for image processing. I find it much easier and more straightforward to use than PS. (I believe most if not all of the prof photographers I know use LrC as standard.) And I expect that Photoshop and LightRoom use the same AI engine as they’re both Adobe. Why wade through the cumbersome PS software when LrC will do it more quickly and efficiently? Unless you’re doing something such as combining disparate images into one, but that’s not the kind of image-making I do. And from what I’ve seen of your work, that’s not what you do either.

    To each his/her own, of course.

    1. Camera Raw (part of Photoshop) and LrC are exactly the same product and do exactly the same thing. I prefer the Bridge+CameraRaw+Photoshop over LightRoom. Plus “Firefly and other AI” features are much better as part of Photoshop.

      1. Long time LrC user, but interested in this workflow. My question is how do you organize photos if not with LrC?

        Really appreciate all of your writing and photos. All the best.

        1. How do I organize photos:

          1. PhotoMechanic allows me to catalog photos with my specific naming convention. This is mother folder. (date/location/shoottitle)
          2. I pick one stars and then sort through them to hit “3 stars” and love them into a new folder in the same original folder. And then use that via Adobe Bridge to edit in Camera Raw and Photoshop.
          3. All edited photos in photoshop format are saved in an “edited” folder in the mother folder (date/location/shoottitle)
          4. A copy of the edited photo is uploaded to Adobe cloud as a back up.
          5. All future edits are made as versions in the “edited” folder on mother folder. (date/location/shoottitle)

          Everything is backed to the local NAS and also to BACKBLAZE. It is all achieved using ChronoSync.

          As for the editing itself, it is very simple! I already wrote about it!

    1. Martin, it has replaced Google Docs, and Grammarly for me. In addition, it has built in “chat” feature for me to have a “chat” with AI about the direction of what I am writing about. It is like having a colleague or an editor hanging about, without really having one.

  3. just wondering if you’ve found an AI tool that can search through hundreds of digital photos and automatically tag 3 stars and above, basically eliminating the manual process on deleting the mad, bad and plain ugly shots.

    1. Hi Kerry

      I wish there was a tool like this. However, Lightroom Cloud has figure out how to do search and clustering. There are a few other different cloud apps that allow to use “AI” to cluster and edit photos. I am not sure if that does anything more than wedding photos — it is called Narrative. There is another one called Imagen. I don’t use any of these to be honest.

      Hope that helps.

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