Getting-started guides

AWS's single door to AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and a dozen more labs — billed by what you use.

Turn recordings into speaker-labelled text — a transcription service built for programs to call, with a browser playground for trying it on your own audio first.

OpenAI's GPT models, rented through a Microsoft Azure account — the enterprise route to the technology behind ChatGPT, with control over where your data gets processed.

Unreachable since 2026 with no shutdown notice: a model catalogue that let you test AI models in a browser tab and then call the same one from your own code.

Speech recognition priced by the minute of audio, built for developers putting it inside something else — plus one Mac app you can simply install.

A hundred-plus open AI models behind one login — try them in a browser chat box, then wire the one you like into software you're building.

Absurdly fast answers from open AI models — try it in a browser before writing any code.

One account and one API key for hundreds of AI models from dozens of companies — with a browser chat room to compare them before you write any code.

The searchable memory behind "chat with your own documents" apps — free to start, with one part the docs say you can use in a browser without code.

A catalog of thousands of ready-to-run AI models — image, video, audio, text — that you can run from a form in your browser and pay for by the run, with no subscription.

The company that builds the training data behind the big AI labs. You almost certainly can't buy it — but its free public leaderboards tell you which AI model is currently best at the job you actually have.

The same models as the chat assistant, billed per token — and under a contract with the opposite privacy default.

The developer doorway to OpenAI's models — build your own apps on the same AI behind ChatGPT, billed by usage.

Two hundred-plus open AI models — text, images, video, speech — on one prepaid account. There is no free trial: it starts with a small prepaid top-up on a card.

Google Cloud's platform for building with AI rather than chatting with it — renamed in 2026, and free to try for 90 days without a card.

Free software with no AI inside it. Aider works in your terminal, edits the files you name, and commits each change — using an AI service you sign up and pay for separately.

Amazon's assistant for AWS — still live in the console, but closed to new coding-tool signups.

Describe an app in plain English and watch it get built in a browser tab — on a free plan with rules.

Anthropic's coding agent: point it at a codebase, describe the change, and it reads, edits and runs things.

A free AI coding agent that works inside your code editor — it plans, edits files and runs commands, asking your permission at each step.

An AI-first code editor that understands your whole project and edits across files as you describe what you want.

The code editor that used to be called Windsurf, with an AI agent built in.

Google's terminal coding agent — still shipping, but since June 2026 it no longer opens to a free Google account.

An AI pair-programmer that lives inside your code editor, suggesting lines and answering questions as you work.

Google's free AI coding app: hand it a whole task and it plans, edits your files, and clicks through a browser to check its own work.

AWS's code editor that writes the plan down before it writes any code.

Describe the app or website you want in plain English and Lovable builds a working, full-stack version you can deploy — no coding required.

OpenAI's coding assistant for the command line: your machine, one project folder, paid for by your ChatGPT sign-in.

Describe an app in ordinary sentences, get a working one you can click — and learn where the money goes.

The AI coding assistant built around never touching your code — now sold only to companies.

Describe an app in plain language; Vercel's v0 builds it, runs it, and puts it online.

AI that acts on the layers in your Figma file — if your plan and your credit balance let it.

HubSpot's AI sits on top of your customer records rather than beside them — and it's billed per job, not per month.

Draft, rewrite and illustrate posts without leaving the WordPress editor.

Email marketing you run from a browser — with AI features scattered through it, most of which begin at Mailchimp's paid plans.

The AI that already reads your customer records — under a name Salesforce keeps changing.

Shopify's own AI, already switched on inside your store's dashboard — it writes the product page, fixes the photo, and answers "how do I do that?"

The AI that already knows what your team said last week — because it lives inside Slack.

Answer a questionnaire about your business and get a whole website back — then spend your real time editing what it wrote.

Describe your business, watch a website appear, then argue with it until it's yours.

The meeting summaries Zoom used to call AI Companion — already in the app, if your admin let you have it.

Ask questions of a long PDF and get cited answers — inside the reader you probably already have.

Drop one long document in and ask it where things are — the least demanding tool in its category to actually try.

Pull the numbers out of stacks of business paperwork — and see exactly where each one came from.

Describe a presentation, document or simple website in a sentence, and Gamma designs the whole thing — then you edit it like any slide deck.

Feed it the same document a hundred times and it learns your fields — the first twenty are the work.

Paste in something you've already written and get a diagram back — no design tool, and for the most part, no prompt (the message you type).

Turns a messy PDF or scan into tidy, labelled text and tables for other software to use — a building block, not an app you chat to.

Read a stack of research papers by asking them questions — and click straight to the passage each answer came from.

Turns messy PDFs and scans into text that software can read — priced by the page, and built for people who write code.

A full desktop PDF editor with an AI panel bolted on — the answer and the file stay in the same window.

The top Duolingo tier, what it actually adds, and how to check your language is covered.

Khan Academy's AI tutor, built to ask you questions instead of handing over the answer.

A library of AI tools built for teachers — lesson plans, quizzes, rubrics, rewritten texts — plus safe, teacher-controlled AI rooms for students.

Quizlet retired Q-Chat. Here's the AI study chat that's inside Quizlet now — what it does, and who can actually use it.

Speaking practice in a new language with an AI that listens to you and scores what you said — phone only, and paid after a seven-day trial.

AI search across company filings, analyst notes and expert interviews — sold to firms, not to individuals.

The AI built into Bloomberg's financial data workstation — and why the "BloombergGPT" you read about isn't something you can sign up for.

Firm software for US accounting and tax practices — and the AI now doing work inside it.

AI that works on your company's card spending — receipts, policy questions, and whether you're overpaying for software.

AI that reads property photos and writes down what it sees — built for real-estate companies, with one way in for individuals.

The free home-value number on Zillow listings — and how far off it usually is.

Turn a video of a real person into a scene starring an animated character — no motion-capture suit, no 3D software on your own computer.

Type a line, hear it spoken — and invent the voice that speaks it by describing it in a sentence.

Turn a rough game idea into concepts, characters and animated art — a tool built only for making games.

Describe an object in a sentence and get a 3D model of it about a minute later.

Turn one long video into a batch of short clips for TikTok, Reels and Shorts — without opening an editor.

The AI image generator built for game art — where the goal is forty things that match, not one thing that dazzles.

Sharpen, clean up and enlarge photos and video you already have — a set of separate paid apps, not one.

Speak your clinical notes straight into the patient record — a Windows app your employer licenses for you, not one you can sign up for.

Ask plain questions about the health insurance you get through work — if your employer gives you the app.

A free AI reference for verified US healthcare professionals: ask a clinical question and get an answer that cites the medical literature. Not built for patients.

AI that reads tissue slides inside hospital and drug-company labs — sold to institutions, not to people.

Hospital software that watches scans as they are taken and alerts the specialist who can act — and that no individual can buy.

Adobe's image generator, built to be commercially safe — trained only on licensed and public-domain content, with legal backing for paying users.

Canva's built-in AI toolkit, Magic Studio — generate images, write copy, design layouts, and edit photos without leaving your design.

The image model that finally gets text right — but you'll reach it through someone else's front door.

Google's image generator has been renamed and moved — here's where it actually lives now, and what you get without paying.

The AI image generator that can actually spell — built for posters, logos, and anything with words in it.

Describe a picture in the same box you'd ask a question, and keep talking until it's right.

One studio for many image and video AIs — plus a canvas that redraws your sketch the moment you move a line.

An image generator with a free allowance that refills every day — built for characters, worlds and concept art.

Freepik's library of ready-made stock pictures and its AI tools for making and enlarging images and video, now under a new name — with one licence for downloaded stock and a different one for what the AI makes.

Describe a card, invitation or image in one sentence and get a finished design you can edit.

Turn a sentence into striking AI art — no design skills required.

The AI image tool that makes real logos and icons, not just pictures of them.

AI21's Jamba files are free to download and run yourself — which is just as well, because the company's own sign-up page no longer opens.

The German company behind Luminous — now sold to governments and large businesses through a salesperson, not a website you can sign up to.

An enterprise AI company that sells its technology to other businesses — and how a beginner can still get in for free.

A translator and a writing polisher in two boxes on one website. They're free to try, with one privacy rule you have to know before you paste anything.

A capable chatbot from a Chinese AI lab — easy to start, with one decision to make first: where your words are stored.

Moonshot AI's assistant for reading long documents and handing off whole tasks — and, outside China, you sign in at kimi.ai, not kimi.com.

Korea's home-grown AI — now built into Naver Search instead of living in a chatbot of its own.

Alibaba's free AI chat — and a first look at a model family you can later download and run yourself.

Japan's frontier AI lab, and the free Japanese chatbot it built — which its own help page says only works from inside Japan.

The assistant built into your firm's case files — it drafts, bills and schedules from work already logged there.

The legal AI that Casetext became — grounded in Westlaw, and sold only through a sales call.

The AI most large law firms are buying — sold by contract, not by credit card, and here is the one part you can get for free today.

Firm-licensed AI that reads a stack of contracts and lines up the clauses that matter in one table.

Enterprise contract AI — what it actually does, and the only three ways a beginner gets near it.

AI that marks up contracts inside the Microsoft Word document you already have open.

A free, open-source workbench for AI image, video and audio generation, where you wire the steps together like a flowchart — and run it on your own computer.

A double-click desktop app that runs AI on your own computer — free, offline, and able to answer questions about a folder of your own files.

The place every open model actually lives — and an orientation to it before you try to use it.

A free AI chat app that runs on your own computer. Your conversations never leave it.

The engine underneath most local AI apps — free, private, and yours to run directly if you're willing to type a command.

Run an AI model entirely on your own computer, through an interface that does not require a terminal.

Run AI on hardware you own — and put it where an app expects a paid cloud service.

Run AI models privately on your own computer — free, offline, and nothing you type leaves your machine.

The chat interface you run yourself — you bring the model, it brings everything else.

The company behind Stable Diffusion and Stable Audio — use its models through a music web app, a pay-per-image API, or free downloads you run yourself.

Run AI models on your own computer with the controls left visible — free, private, and built for people who want to tinker.

The engine that serves one open AI model to a lot of people at once — free software that expects a serious graphics card and a Linux machine.

A free AI note-taker for Zoom, Google Meet and Teams that records, transcribes and summarises your calls — generous on the free plan, with sharing defaults worth changing.

An AI note-taker that joins your video calls, transcribes them and sends summaries — once you've told it which meetings to join and who should get the notes.

An AI notepad for meetings: it listens through your computer instead of sending a bot to the call, then turns your rough notes into a clean write-up.

A notes app that files everything for you, then answers questions about what you saved.

An AI notetaker that joins your meetings, transcribes them live, and hands you a searchable summary afterward.

An AI note-taker that joins your Zoom, Teams and Google Meet calls, writes up summaries and action items, and can search across your meetings, email and chat.

Writes down what's said in your calls from inside your browser — nothing joins the meeting.

Sends a bot to your video calls so you can stop typing notes and actually listen.

An AI composer you steer with styles and settings rather than by describing a song.

Describe the background music a scene needs and it composes one to order — though right now there is no working way in.

Describe a song in a sentence and Google's Gemini app writes, sings and mixes it — free.

Royalty-free background music in a couple of minutes — and the licence rules that decide what you may do with it.

Build a royalty-free backing track by clicking tags instead of describing a song — then pay to take it away.

Describe a song in words and Suno generates a full track — vocals, lyrics, and instruments — in about a minute.

Make surprisingly good music from a sentence — just know that, right now, the song stays on Udio.

Turn one paper you already have into a visual map of the field around it.

Ask a research question in plain English and get an answer built only from published papers — including the catch buried in the word "published."

Searches and extracts from academic literature at speed — with a published accuracy gap you need to know about.

A highlighter for everything you read — and a decision about who gets to see it.

A writing assistant that follows you across every app — which is both the point and the thing to think about.

Upload a spreadsheet, ask questions about it in plain English, and get real calculations back.

Start from one paper you trust and let the citations draw you a map of the field.

A beginner's guide to editing an academic paper with AI — and to telling your journal you did.

Start from one paper you trust and let the citation trail lead you to the rest.

Turn a research paper into a summary card you can actually skim.

Upload a research paper, ask it questions, and get answers that point back at the page.

Checking whether a scientific paper has been backed up or shot down by the research that came after it.

A free, non-profit academic search engine — with AI features that cover far less than the search does.

A grammar checker built for research writing, where the specialist words your usual checker underlines are the ones that are right.

A searchable database of business contacts plus the tools to email and call them — powerful for sales outreach, and easy to waste credits in.

A spreadsheet that fills itself in: start with a list of companies or people, and Clay looks up details from many data providers and AI research — row by row, for credits.

What to do in your first week on a Gong account your employer pays for.

The sales platform your employer buys for you — and how to get something out of its AI once you have a seat.

A beginner's first half-hour with the AI photo editor built for product listings.

Finding out whether ChatGPT and Google's AI answers mention your business — and what it costs to keep watching.

The tool that tells you what the pages already ranking cover — and what your draft is missing.

A beginner's first 20 minutes with the most popular AI chatbot.

A chat assistant with a genuinely capable free tier — and a training default worth knowing about before you start.

An AI writing assistant for marketing copy — ads, emails, social posts, and blog drafts from a prompt or a template.

Google's assistant, free and genuinely capable — with a privacy model built on human review rather than a training switch.

A chatbot with a live feed — it reads the web and X as you ask, so it can talk about what happened an hour ago.

A marketing-team writing platform that learns your brand's voice — and costs money from day one.

The free AI assistant already sitting inside WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook, plus its own app and website.

Microsoft's free AI assistant, already sitting inside the Windows and Office world you use every day.

The French-built assistant that also works through multi-step jobs — from a company that publishes its AI for anyone to run.

Upload your own documents and NotebookLM answers questions using only those sources — with citations, and even a podcast-style audio summary.

AI built into the Notion workspace — draft and summarize in your docs, and ask questions across everything you've written.

An answer engine: ask a question, and it searches the live web and replies with a written answer plus clickable citations.

A full web browser with an AI assistant built in — it can read the page you're on and, if you let it, click and type on it for you.

One app, many AI chatbots from different companies — paid for with a shared pool of points instead of a separate subscription to each.

Reword, tidy and check writing you already have — with honest limits on what its AI detector can tell you.

Find out whether ChatGPT and Gemini mention your business — and what to do when they don't.

A free-to-start video editor from the makers of TikTok, with AI captions and AI video built in — and terms worth reading before you upload your face.

Turn a phone video of yourself talking into a captioned, edited clip ready to post.

Describe a shot, get a few seconds of video with the sound already in it.

Turn one photo of a face and a voice recording into a talking video — under a rule about whose face that can be that is stricter than most beginners expect.

Turn a script into a talking-head video with a realistic AI avatar — no camera, studio, or on-camera talent required.

One subscription, many video models, and a camera you direct from a menu — with billing terms worth reading before you pay.

Describe a video in a sentence, get a finished cut back, then edit it by typing.

Type a description, get a short video clip back — paid for in credits, under terms that change depending on whether you are a paying member.

Describe a shot or animate a still photo, and get a few seconds of silent video you can then re-cut and restyle.

Turn writing you already have into a narrated video, without opening a video editor.

Turn one photo into a five-second video that squishes, melts or explodes — usually in a couple of taps, usually free.

Turn a text prompt or a still image into short AI-generated video — a filmmaking tool you drive by describing what you want.

Type a script, pick a presenter, get a finished video — no camera, no crew, no being on screen yourself.

A video editor that runs in your web browser, where you can cut a talking video by deleting words from its transcript.

Edit audio and video by editing the transcript — powerful, intuitive, and easier to misuse than it looks.

Turn text into remarkably natural speech — and, with permission, clone a specific voice — across dozens of languages.

Turning a written script into a finished voiceover — and what it actually costs to keep one.

An app that reads web pages, documents and files out loud to you. The free version is basic, and the paid trial bills you automatically if you don't cancel in time.

Hold a key, talk, let go — Wispr Flow types what you said, cleaned up, into whatever app your cursor is in.

Automation built from public code — around 760 integrations anyone can read, and a free cloud allowance that resets every morning.

An all-in-one AI workspace: ask its Super Agent for a finished deck, spreadsheet, document or podcast, and it plans the steps and builds it for you.

Build automations by dragging boxes onto a canvas — with AI steps built in, not bolted on.

Give it your inbox and calendar, and it handles the admin around them — on a schedule, without being asked.

Visual automation that connects your apps — and a meter that counts differently from its best-known rival.

Give Manus a goal and it works through it on its own computer in the cloud — researching, browsing, writing files, even building a website — while you do something else.

Microsoft's automation tool — already inside the licence your employer bought.

Connect your apps and let them pass work to each other — with a version you can run yourself, free, forever.

Automation you can buy once instead of renting — and what "lifetime" actually covers.

Describe a job in plain English and get an AI specialist that does it — no flowchart, no code.

Enterprise-grade automation you get by asking a salesperson, not by signing up.

Enterprise automation you can finally sign up for on your own — with a free tier licensed for practice, not for real work.

Connect the apps you already use and let them talk to each other — no code.