AI chatbot usage and concepts
gettyAI is the hottest topic in tech, but the headlines often miss out on how the average person can actually use the technology. The answer comes in the form of AI software packages, which let people make websites or articles, can help programmers generate computer code or even conjure entire pieces of music. If you want to get involved with AI in a practical rather than theoretical way, AI software is what you need.
What Is AI Software?
AI software is the front-end for artificial intelligence, the layer that sits between the backroom tech and the person trying to use AI. It’s how the tech is packaged up in a form the average person can actually use.
If you dig deep enough, you’ll find a lot of AI software uses the same AI intelligence in the background. Big names that actually make the core artificial intelligence tech include OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
AI software directs that intelligence, moulding it into a form suited for a particular job.
What Are Different Types Of AI Software?
The most famous type of AI software is the chatbot. And even when AI software has much more specific aims than those of a conversational chatbot, you’ll often use chatbot-like written prompts to interact with the AI.
For example, in AI art generating tools, you typically describe what you want a created image to look like, with words. There are a bunch of these generative categories, for text, images and music.
Another kind of generative AI software package showed up long before the explosion of interest in chatbots: the computer code helper. These will often act like an autocomplete for coders, used to dramatically speed up dev jobs.
Top AI Software
We are amid an explosion of AI software, with start-ups and established companies all trying to exploit the rapid development and attention in this area. This also means there’s a lot of implementations not worth trying, or at times piggy-backing of similarly-named AI software packages.
Below you’ll find some of the most interesting and useful applications of AI that can actually slot into the day-to-day lives of the average person, at work or play. Some require a subscription, but often come with free access, either with a limited feature set or for a limited amount of time.
FramerFramer screenshot
FramerRemember when making a website meant learning HTML? Framer makes websites using AI, no coding required. You can simply write a short paragraph describing the website you’re after, and Framer will make it.
It’s a neat tool for folks who want to create simple, bespoke websites for their hobbies or small businesses. You can try Framer out for free, while subscriptions that unlock more complex designs and facilitate higher traffic sites cost $5-25 a month. Framer hosts your website, making the process of getting a site online very quick and easy.
Grammarly
If you took the humble spellchecker and infused it with AI to make it much smarter and more useful, you’d get Grammarly. As well as being able to check spelling and grammar, it will make suggestions on tone and style, and can rewrite your sentences.
There’s a free version of Grammarly, but it lacks more advanced features like the ability to change the tone of your writing, check for plagiarism and rewrite your work. It costs $12 a month, when you sign up for a year.
Suno.aiSuno AI screenshot
SunoWhen chatbots first arrived, the equivalent generative tools for music were pretty bad. Suno is a remarkably good music generator that can create two-minute songs based on a text prompt. It’s bags of fun for the average person… and utterly depressing for musicians aspiring to work in the commercial music space.
These songs can have singing, and you can even specify lyrics or have Suno make up its own. It’s free to use. You just need to create an account at the Suno website. There are paid Pro ($8/month) and Premier ($24/month) subscriptions that allow for generated songs to be used for commercial purposes, and for more songs to be made each month.
Otter.ai
This AI software is great if you have to keep track of meetings or a lot of interviews as part of your work. It’s a transcription tool that, thanks to the relatively recent addition of advanced AI, can now sum up what happens in each of your sessions.
It’s quite smart. Otter.ai is able to recognise different speakers in a conversation. A more recent addition, the app also has a chatbot, letting you ask about meetings of the past without having to dig through the old transcriptions.
You can try out Otter.ai for free, but paid versions allow for many more minutes of recorded chats over a month. You can also upload audio and video files after the fact, where in the free version the app has to effectively be recording live.
Jasper
Jasper is one of the most popular AI software tools for those who need to generate marketing copy that might be for use on a company website, for example, or to create a newsletter or marketing email.
It came out in 2021, before the explosion of ChatGPT. While you can ask a chatbot to draft up such content, Jasper has an interface tailored for the job, and offers multiple “brand voices” with higher tiers of subscription. These subscriptions start at $39 a month. There’s no free tier, but there is a free trial.
Cursor.sh
One of the key uses of AI is in speeding-up programming, and helping those new to the practice to learn how to code. Cursor.sh is one of the better examples of this in action.
It still makes you deal with code, but you can use it to generate fresh code from a simple text prompt. Or it can explain what a chunk of selected code actually does, which could make it an effective learning tool.
There’s a free version of this AI software that limits how many instructions you can make each month. The less limited Pro version costs $20 a month. Cursor runs off GPT 3.5 and GPT 4, the tech behind ChatGPT.
remove.bg
How about something real simple? remove.bg is an online piece of AI software that can remove the background in photos and other images.
You can also then replace that background with another from the site’s archive, a block color or gradient. It is remarkably effective, able to deal with hair well, and deftly handles elements you might assume would be tricky to judge, such as car windows. This piece of AI software is free to use online.
Bottom Line
AI is changing the world. But if you want to see how and why, you only need to look at the quality of AI software out there.
It can already automate jobs that would normally take many hours to complete, and does an at least fair job in the process. Should it make you wonder whether AI is out for your job? Quite possibly, but according to some futurists few fields of work will go untouched by AI.
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