5 AI-powered Apps for Personal and Team Productivity

You come to work and hear a message bing. Your early bird of a colleague is asking about something discussed at yesterday’s meeting. You cannot recall anything, so you reach out to your notebook. The notebook is messy as always, and it is impossible to find anything in a muddle of sticker notes, occasional scrap papers, and disorderly scribbles. A few other notifications break the morning silence. On Facebook, your partner reminds you about your relative’s birthday party today and asks if you have bought the present as promised. Of course, you completely forgot about the party. While trying to explain your forgetfulness, you miss a WhatsApp message from your doctor asking to confirm the appointment. Your work with a tight deadline stares at you from the computer’s screen. It will be a long day.

Information overload

We have to remember thousands of things daily to keep up with life. An average person receives about 74GB of information daily while our conscious minds can handle 40–50 bits (around 6 bytes) per second or 0.51 GB of information daily.

Processing modern amounts of data comes with a price for our brains. Our attention span shortens; we may feel exhausted, chronically stressed, or angry. Information overload may also result in visual problems, trouble sleeping, and mental health issues.

Luckily, technological advancements that often cause these problems also offer an effective solution. Last year’s artificial intelligence boom inspired many services to make AI a part of their services. With these services, you can delegate routine energy-consuming work and information processing to artificial intelligence, freeing your mental capacities for more important tasks.

Let’s review five apps to help you become your most efficient and less stressed self. These apps are practical for personal productivity and can be used in a work team where they can work even better.

Activity monitoring: CleverControl

Not sure where your time goes? Do you seem to work hard but complete only 10% of the planned work? Is your team constantly missing deadlines? The problem may be that you use your work time inefficiently or lose focus. CleverControl is the solution that will help you understand work patterns and make them more efficient.

Designed as an employee monitoring solution, CleverControl records almost all activity on the computer:

• typed text (on request)
• visited websites
• search queries
• social media activity
• messengers
• apps activity
• active/inactive time
• start and end of work and more.

The system then analyzes the collected data: the top-used apps, websites, and messengers, time spent on them, and even the most and the least active hours. These insights will let you understand your team’s (or your own) workflow and their most and least productive hours and plan accordingly.

AI Scoring, the latest addition to CleverControl’s powerful feature suite, evaluates each team member’s productivity and briefly comments on their workflow, successful patterns, and distractions. This way, AI Scoring saves managers a lot of time on productivity analysis and evaluation, allowing them to focus on more important strategic tasks.

CleverControl also offers self-monitoring functionality. Each team member can access a personal productivity dashboard and evaluate their work.

Summing up, CleverControl is a solid solution for analyzing productivity patterns personally and as a team. Thanks to rich analytics and AI, you get a ready summary of your work time. Using it, you can easily see your most common distractions and where the time goes and take action to improve.

Research Assistant: Perplexity

Information is one of the most valuable resources of our time. That is why, being able to find credible, up-to-date, and relevant information is one of the most useful skills of a modern specialist in any sphere. Previously, you had to google for hours, scrolling through tons of information until your brain burst. Now, you can get exactly what you need at the click of a mouse.

Perplexity is an advanced AI-powered search and research assistant. It aims to help you find accurate, comprehensive information across various domains quickly and effortlessly.

Perplexity searches multiple Internet sources in real time and delivers precise, well-cited answers. There is a “Focus” feature that narrows down the search and significantly improves output. You can select one of the following focuses:

• Web: Perplexity will search for information across the entire Internet;
• Academic: AI will focus the search on published academic papers;
• Math: Perplexity will help with solving equations and finding numerical answers;
• Writing: Perplexity will generate text without searching for information online;
• Video: AI will find relevant video materials;
• Social: Perplexity will search for discussions and opinions on the topic.

Like in other language models, you communicate with Perplexity in the chat form or a so-called Thread. You can unite several Threads into a Space for convenience, for example, to keep all Threads related to one topic in one place.

Perplexity is an irreplaceable tool for those who need to find and operate large amounts of information daily. It can help with SEO content, factual writing, book summarization, and generating text based on research. Perplexity can conduct in-depth research on complex topics and synthesize information from diverse sources in seconds, leaving long hours of googling in the past.

Unified messaging: Texts

Every one of us has at least half a dozen messengers and socials nowadays. Slack for work communications, WhatsApp for family chats, Discord for studying or playing a favorite video game — the list may go on and on. With so many chat apps, it is easy to miss an important message or forget something important.

The Texts platform gathers all your inboxes in one place. It allows you to send and receive messages from the most popular socials: iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn, Signal, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and more. Although it may seem unsafe at first, Texts values your privacy. They do not receive or store any of your messages. Your data is transmitted in encrypted form.

Texts offer a lot of useful features to make your communication easier and more convenient. For example, it allows you to search all messages from forever ago. Also, you can read messages without notifying the user and keep chats unread by default until you reply to them. Texts allow you to schedule messages for later: the message will be sent when the receiver is active.

The platform has an AI assistant to boost your productivity. AI can summarize the chat, so you can quickly recap the ongoing conversation. Besides, you can save time by letting the AI draft your responses and even translate them to other languages.

Wrapping up, Texts helps significantly simplify communication by uniting multiple messengers into a user-friendly platform and offering additional powerful features.

Scheduling: Motion

Planning is an art on its own. Minding endless to-dos, prioritizing them, trying not to miss any deadlines, and setting realistic deadlines are tough and time-consuming.

Motion, an AI-powered personal productivity tool, aims to revolutionize planning at its core. It takes all the planning work off your shoulders, delivering a clear, prioritized, and personalized daily schedule, almost like your personal assistant.

The so-called Happiness Algorithm lies at the core of Motion. Its goal is to maximize your satisfaction and happiness. It automatically schedules your tasks based on priorities, deadlines, and available time. You input your tasks, and the AI intelligently allocates them throughout your day or week, considering your peak productivity hours and minimizing distractions.

Motion takes care of your deadlines. It has some predictive capabilities and alerts you when you may miss a deadline — even if this deadline is weeks ahead. The app also reschedules your past deadlines to ensure you do these tasks any way.

Motion will take care of your workload too. It will alert you when you take too much work or set impossible deadlines.

The app easily integrates with the most popular calendar apps: Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and Apple Calendar (iCloud), allowing you to combine all work and personal calendars in one place.

All in all, Motion is a one-of-a-kind smart planner app that can relieve you of a huge part of administrative work and save significant time and effort on organizing things. The app can be used for personal productivity and in teams where it can be used to plan entire projects.

Meeting Assistant: Otter

Some organizations love meetings so much that they are ready to schedule a few every day. And at the end of the day, you are often left with some half-legible notes and a head full of mixed information.

Otter is a meeting assistant that summarizes information from your meetings and turns it into an actionable plan. OtterPilot joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meeting, automatically transcribes the discussion, and takes notes. After the meeting, it can condense the information into a 30-second summary, allowing you to quickly recap the meeting topic and remember only the most important things.

Otter can automatically capture action steps with the context of the discussion and assign them to team members. Otter AI Chat can generate emails and status updates for you or answer questions about the contents of your meetings. There is also a team chat feature where you can discuss important project info with your colleagues.

Otter can significantly improve productivity across various fields, from sales to education. It acts as a digital scribe, capturing and organizing spoken information in a readily accessible concise format. This way the app takes a part of administrative work off your shoulders, allowing you to focus on more important work.

Wrapping Up

We have reviewed five AI assistants that can help you become more organized and productive. Thanks to its rapid development, AI can already take over a part of your routine daily tasks: remember your to-dos and deadlines, analyze your work to help you become more efficient, search and summarize information for you, and more. This frees up your time for more important and creative tasks.

Let’s hope that, in the near future, we will see more such AI-powered solutions to help us organize and navigate our chaotic lives.