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Nearly four years into the latest AI boom sparked by ChatGPT, here are the tools that have actually stuck and make my life, work, and personal projects much easier on my Mac.
Fair warning: you have probably read or heard about most, if not all, of the tools I’m about to describe. But that is partly the point of this article. While it is always great to learn of a highly obscure, hidden gem just waiting to be found, it has been my experience that sometimes mainstream products are mainstream for a reason.
That is particularly true for AI-powered tools, which tend to rely on models that are just too expensive to train, or even run, outside of the confines of very few frontier labs. What does make a difference, however, is how much you manage to get out of these tools.
And here is the thing: not all tools are meant for everyone, AI-powered or not. Below, you’ll find some examples of how I have been using these tools to streamline and improve my work, which will hopefully spark a few ideas for your own workflow.
If that’s not you, that’s perfectly ok. Better yet, if you have a favorite tool or use case that has been helping out in your own workflow, I’d love to read about it in the comments.
That said, here are the tools that have been making a big difference in my day-to-day.
I currently record five podcasts a week and edit seven shows. For most of them, I also handle publishing, including episode descriptions, show notes, and other supporting material such as social media posts for plain-text quotes or short reels and clips. One of the shows also has a weekly newsletter based on the episode’s content.
Once I finish editing, I listen to the entire episode from beginning to end, while I write down links for the show notes, mark the timestamps for each chapter, and flag sentences or moments that might work well as social media posts. As soon as the listen-through is over, I write the episode description and social media copy while everything is still fresh in my mind.
This has been my workflow for roughly a decade, and it has always worked well. Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve also added MacWhisper to the process.
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