With several billion-dollar companies now having spent years training and refining their AI models, the market for specific productivity tools that anyone can use has become diverse and competitive. Here, we’ve picked out five tools that have influencers and office workers raving.
Each provides something you won’t find in the biggest suites from the likes of Google and Microsoft, but they also come with their own costs and drawbacks. Buzziest doesn’t always mean best; these tools are at the frontier of consumer AI, meaning there’s really no telling what potential complications they’ll run into.
Howie – the email EA
What it does: Howie is an executive assistant that lives in your email. When it’s time to organise a meeting, you can CC the bot as though you’re including another team member in the conversation. It will read the chain, look through your calendar and talk to the other attendees to organise a time. Howie will also email you to handle conflicts, and will remember your preferences and rules, and can contact the appropriate people if you need to cancel or clear a day. Howie has been highly praised by founders and executives, as it gives the impression of a human executive assistant but works much faster and 24 hours a day. It’s also been compared favourably to services like Calendly, which require meeting attendees to do more work. The company says there’s always a “human in the loop”, with staff able to resolve issues manually.
Where it’s from: Howie was founded in late 2023 by serial entrepreneur Austin Petersmith and David Newman, in the USA. It launched publicly late last year, attracting $US6 million ($8.46 million) in seed funding from True Ventures, Perplexity chief executive Aravind Srinivas, Superhuman chief executive CEO Rahul Vohra, and others.
Keep in mind: Howie might not cost as much as a human assistant, but it’s not free. The basic tier is around $50 per month, with a $200 per month pro version adding the ability to rename your assistant and give it an email address at your domain. Many recommendations mention that Howie is so good, people often don’t realise it’s AI. And while that might give a good impression of you and your company, it’s ultimately better practice to tell people you’re referring them to a bot. The company says it uses a waterfall of AI models to maximise accuracy and evaluate confidence, so it can take up to 15 minutes for Howie to send a message.
Kimi – the long-memory chatbot
What it does: While ChatGPT still leads in service integration, and Claude is a go-to for nuance and coding, the fast-growing Kimi is generating buzz for its lower cost and extremely long context. Kimi can ingest truly massive documents or spreadsheets, analysing them for summaries or queries, making it possible to turn a year’s worth of notes, or 50 big PDF reports, into something usable. Kimi also has an “agent swarm” mode, where dozens of AI agents work in parallel to turn your data into book-length reports or fully functioning websites, or where you can get insights and suggestions from multiple perspectives by assigning roles to the agents. Aside from that, it’s a “do anything” chatbot with integrations from Google Docs to OpenClaw.
Where it’s from: Kimi is a product of China’s Moonshot AI, founded in 2023 by former Google and Meta researcher Yang Zhilin, considered one of the world’s top AI architects. The company has grown massively in the past few months, reportedly eyeing an $US18 billion valuation in its current funding round, up from $4.3 billion late last year. Investors include Alibaba, Tencent and 5Y Capital.
Keep in mind: Simply being a China-based service raises potential data sovereignty concerns, but researchers have also highlighted specific risks when it comes to Kimi, including its models failing basic safety and security checks, a lack of guardrails and severe hallucinations. Moonshot’s privacy policy also explicitly states it retains user input for training, which is a concern for business use. Kimi has a free service and several paid tiers, with the cheapest to include “agent swarm” being around $50 per month.
Gamma – the automatic PowerPoint
What it does: Designed to ease the anxiety of starting from a blank deck, Gamma quickly generates entire slideshows in response to a single prompt, and then lets you edit or rearrange by conversing, asking for changes, or uploading data and documents. The service also lets you output results to PDF documents, social media slides or full websites. Gamma has a lot in common with Canva’s Magic Editor, except the two firms are coming at the issue from opposite directions; Canva is a design service with a lot more flexibility that now has an AI element, whereas Gamma is AI native and aims to create designs that are visually on par, a lot quicker.
Where it’s from: Founded in the USA in 2020 by a team of Stanford engineers, Gamma is led by former investment banker Grant Lee. It hit $US100 million in annual revenue late last year, with a lean team of about 50 people. It has a valuation of around $US2.1 billion, following a $US68 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Keep in mind: Gamma uses “AI credits” for its payment system, and these credits are used up when your actions require advanced AI models. So for example with the 4000 credits you get on the $35-per-month Pro plan, you might be able to create a large number of decks with basic information, you’ll burn through credits the more you rely on AI to generate, refine or edit the content. Touching up the designs manually without using the AI can also be tricky, but you can export them to PowerPoint.
Audiogest – the meeting whisperer
What it does: Businesspeople love their deliverables. And onboarding. And working at pace to align scopes with go-to-market strategies. And while there are a lot of AI transcription tools out there, Audiogest has become a cult favourite because it has this kind of business use as its sole focus. It has a no-nonsense interface, custom dictionaries for names and jargon, and is fully GDPR-compliant with European data centres, which is a plus for business use when most transcription services are American. You upload a recording of your meeting, it gets transcribed, and then you can ask questions about it or even generate files and deliverables with one click, from plans to briefs to LinkedIn posts.
Where it’s from: Audiogest is based in The Netherlands, and comes from a small group of developers focused on cleaner, safer business AI solutions. It’s primarily maintained by Thomas Mol, who created the service in 2023. Its privacy policy states that all data collected is stored in European servers, though the creation of documents and summaries uses OpenAI’s APIs.
Keep in mind: While some users will find Audiogest to be more focused and less flashy than the likes of Otter or ChatGPT, it also has no free tier. If you’re doing a small amount of work with it, you can pay as you go, which costs around $5.60 per hour of uploaded recordings. A subscription option gives you a 20-hour monthly limit at around $30, while a team plan adds collaboration features and cheaper per-hour uploads.
T3 Chat – the bot aggregator
What it does: Instead of bouncing between three or more different chatbot providers, T3 Chat lets you access — and even pay for — dozens of AI models from different companies in the one place. Many models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Moonshot, DeepSeek, xAI and more are included; you pay T3 around $11 per month for a certain amount of credit, and every time you send a message it deducts some from your base usage (which refreshes every four hours) or your overage (which is your limit for the month). So from the same interface, you can compare the output from GPT 5.3 and Sonnet 4.6, which alongside fast performance has made T3 a go-to for power users.
Where it’s from: T3 Chat comes from Ping Labs, a company run by AI-focused YouTube influencer Theo Browne, who is based in the USA and backed by Y Combinator. He also created the T3 Stack web app framework and most recently T3 code for AI-assisted coding. By default, T3 Chat tells models not to pass your data back to AI companies for use in training.
Keep in mind: Some users will find T3 Chat cost-effective, since it’s buying access in bulk and passing the savings down to each individual, but there will likely be users who pay more than they would just going to OpenAI and Anthropic directly. For workflows with high privacy needs, it also adds an extra (and much smaller) company into the mix. T3 Chat doesn’t have a persistent memory, and intensive tasks like image generation and crunching large amounts of data will burn through your credit.
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Tim Biggs is a writer covering consumer technology, gadgets and video games.Connect via X or email.
