Introduction
These are the free AI tools I’ve tried recently in different categories, some of which might be as useful to you as ever.
Co-Pilot in Bing
First up is co-pilot in bing. As many of you know, I’ve had my issues with Microsoft’s bing search engine in the past, but I do have to admit that of all the search engines integrating AI, they’re the only ones getting it right.
So far, it’s simple to use. Enter your search term in the Box as you normally would. I’ll go with “should I buy an electric vehicle.” Instead of hitting enter on your keyboard to see the usual search results, click the co-pilot icon here on the right to have a conversation with co-pilot. I like for this one that it shows both the pros and the cons. When it’s done, it’ll show you the sources for its response. You can give the response a thumbs up or a thumbs down, copy it to your clipboard to paste it wherever you want it, export it to Microsoft Word or as a PDF or text file, share it on social media, and here below it’ll give you suggested follow-up questions or you can ask your own follow-up questions here in the box below.
ClickUp
Next up is ClickUp. This one is an all-in-one project management Suite that integrates task management features with artificial intelligence capabilities. Some of those features include real-time chat which is great when collaborating with a team. They have dashboards that are completely customizable. One of its AI tools can summarize threads, saving time and improving productivity, and another one of its AI tools they call ClickUp Brain helps to deliver solutions by collecting Knowledge from across an entire organization’s workspace to eliminate tedious work. The free plan for ClickUp is quite generous, but one downside is that the storage is limited to 100 megabytes. If you ever need additional features including unlimited storage, plans start at $7 per month.
GFPGAN
GFPGAN is a completely free photo restoration AI tool that can take your old photos and restore them easily. The creators of this have made the code available on GitHub for anyone to use. The version for this that I’m showing you is on Hugging Face. To use it, you could click here to upload or simply drag and drop the image on your computer in the Box to upload below, click on submit. They use a queuing system, so this could take minutes to complete. When it’s done, the restored image will show up here. You can click on download to save it to your computer.
Character AI
Character AI, unlike ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and co-pilot, is more of a fun conversational AI chatbot experience where you can chat with millions of user-created characters. On here, you could create your own character or do a search for a character. I’ll do a search for the infamous chemistry teacher Walter White. Looks like there’s quite a few. I’ll select the one here at the top. In the box below, I’ll ask a question he might know about. That’s a pretty funny answer. I’ll ask a follow-up.
PO
An interesting one from the folks at Kora, the well-known social question and answer website, on PO you can have conversations or create images with a wide variety of AI bots to choose from. It currently supports ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Llama from Meta, and many others. For example, this bot called Assistant is good for general purpose questions. On PO, no matter which bot you use, they’ll give you 3,000 compute points per day to use for free. The number of points used per message will vary depending on which bot you use. In addition to the web, PO also has dedicated apps for Windows, Mac OS, iOS, and Android.
GPT-4
OpenAI has made its latest conversational AI GPT-4 available for free with some limitations. More on that later. I’ll now do a couple prompts that made the headlines recently when another chatbot gave a hilariously absurd response and we’ll see how GPT-4 does with them. The first one, “cheese not sticking to pizza.” Well, that was quite extensive. At least it didn’t recommend using glue, which is an improvement. Here’s the other prompt, “how many rocks should a child eat?” This one we responded better as well. At least it says children should not eat rocks. With the free plan, there is a limit of 16 messages every 3 hours for GPT-4. Then you get reverted back to GPT-3.5 with unlimited access. For additional features and access to OpenAI’s various models, plans start at $20 per month.
Lumen5
Lumen5 is a video creation platform powered by AI that I mentioned in another video recently, so I’ll keep this brief. This video creator enables people with no experience to easily create videos in minutes. It has pre-designed templates that you can use, and you can also do AI voiceovers for your videos using its AI. After you upload your transcript, it generates a complete video sequence based on the text you provided. When getting started, check out their guides and tips section to get help. Using it for free, Lumen5 does have a max video resolution of 720p. You can only create five videos per month. AI voiceovers are limited to 2 minutes and they’ll put their branded watermark on your videos. If you need additional features, their premium plans start at $19 per month.
Leonardo.ai
We’ll go through the remainder of these more quickly. Leonardo.ai tool, they make it easy to create truly amazing images. If you’re just getting started using it, I recommend checking out their how-to guide on their site. To try it out for free, they do give you 150 tokens per day, which is equivalent to two or three images. This resets once per day. If you ever decide that you need more tokens, they do have plans that start at $10 per month.
Pixart AI Writer
Here’s a cool one that is completely free. Pixart AI Writer is a collection of tools to create articles, product descriptions, slogans, marketing copy for any business, and a whole lot more. Some of the more popular tools on here I’ve used that are pretty good include article writer, title generator, grammar checker, and the prompt generator is great for those times you need help to write the perfect prompt. No matter what AI tool you’re using, once again all of these tools on Pixart AI Writer are 100% free.
Canva
Canva, the popular online graphic design tool to create social media posts, presentations, videos, and more, has gotten into the AI game, offering several tools for free including this free online AI image generator that can easily turn your text prompt into an image. It’s simple to use. On the left, enter your prompt, select your style. I’ll select dreamy, then select the aspect ratio. I’ll go with landscape. When you’re done with that, select generate image. These didn’t turn out too badly. With a free Canva account, they do offer a ton of features for free, but for creating AI images, there is a lifetime limit of 50 images. They do offer paid plans with additional features. For individuals, it’s $15 per month and as part of their team’s plan, it’s $10 per person per month.
