Napkin, Granola: AI Tools to Boost Productivity

Napkin: Transforming Text into Impactful Visuals

Napkin AI is an innovative tool that allows users to quickly convert text into various visual formats such as diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps, or timelines. The user starts by inserting text into the Napkin editor, then selects a portion of the text that the AI will analyze to suggest suitable visual formats. These visuals can be customized with icons, colors, fonts, and connectors, and can be exported in various formats like PNG, PDF, SVG, or PPT.

This tool is particularly valuable for those who need to create presentations or educational documents. For example, using a definition of the SWOT matrix, Napkin AI generated several options, including a graphical representation of the four quadrants with icons and subtitles, ready to be integrated into a presentation.

Napkin offers a free plan that includes 500 credits per week, sufficient for standard use. For those who need more features, a premium subscription is available for $12 per month.

Granola: Invisible Transcription for Your Meetings

Granola is an application available on desktop (Mac, Windows) and mobile (iOS) that transcribes your meetings in the background, directly from your device's audio. Unlike other tools, Granola does not add fictitious participants to your meetings, remaining invisible to your interlocutors.

The operation is simple: you take notes as usual, and at the end of the meeting, Granola merges your notes with the transcription to create a structured report, highlighting key points and actions to be taken. The application syncs with your calendar and can even prepare a brief before each meeting, based on the context of your previous exchanges.

Granola stands out for its discreet and hybrid approach, ideal for professionals who juggle meetings without disrupting the experience for clients or partners. After the meeting, an AI assistant helps you query the notes to find a decision, draft a follow-up email, or list tasks to be completed. An MCP connector also allows you to link your notes to tools like Claude or ChatGPT. Granola is free for access to the last 30 days of notes, with a paid version starting at $14 per user per month.

Vook.ai: Fast and Accurate Transcription

Finding a transcription tool that is both reliable and accurate, capable of distinguishing different speakers and functioning in noisy environments, has always been a challenge. After testing numerous tools, Vook.ai has emerged as the ideal solution. Launched in 2023 by three French entrepreneurs, this platform already has over 60,000 users and is adopted by renowned companies like L'Oréal and TF1.

Vook.ai offers several advantages: extremely fast transcription, taking only a few minutes even for long audio files, compatibility with multiple formats, the ability to edit transcriptions, and support for six languages, including French.

However, full access to Vook.ai requires a paid subscription. While a free trial is offered, regular users will need to opt for the Pro plan, which provides ten hours of transcription per month. For occasional needs, a credit-based payment system is available at three euros per hour of transcription.

Recall: An Enhanced Knowledge Base

Every week, I set aside dozens of articles, videos, and newsletters with the intention of returning to them later, but I never do. Recall is designed to solve this problem by presenting itself as an AI-enhanced knowledge base.

The operation is simple. You save an article, a YouTube video, a podcast, a PDF, or your own notes with a click, and Recall automatically summarizes, organizes, and links them to other content in your base via a knowledge graph. The interest goes beyond summarization. Once your content is saved, an assistant allows you to query your entire base, the web, or both, using your choice of model (Claude, GPT, Gemini). An MCP access also allows you to connect your base to a third-party tool.

Recall is accessible on the web, as a Chrome and Firefox extension, and on mobile. The free plan allows unlimited content saving but limits the AI portion to ten summaries per month. For daily use, the paid plan starts at $10 per month, billed annually.

youraislopbores.me: Putting Humans at the Heart of the Chatbot

While many AI tools have been highlighted this week, youraislopbores.me offers a radically different approach: a human-powered chatbot. On this site, you ask a question or request an image just like on ChatGPT, but on the other end, a human responds within 75 seconds using their keyboard and mouse. Launched in March by Mihir Maroju, a 17-year-old high school student in Puducherry, the site attracted over 25 million unique visitors in a month.

The site is summarized in two tabs: "human" for asking your questions, and "larp as ai" to play the role of the robot and earn credits (each request costs one). For example, when asking for a drawing of Sonic surfing, I received a humorous doodle, far from the perfection of AIs, but charming in its imperfection. A question like "How many Rs are in strawberry?" received the answer: "Two, at the end."

This playful concept raises interesting questions. There is a Cloudflare captcha asking to "verify that you are human (ironic)" to access the queue of fake AIs, and a golden rule: "Be nice, this is not Grok." While bots dominate web traffic, millions of people spend hours imitating machines, simply for fun. It's slow, it's imperfect, but it's profoundly human.