10 Free AI Tools Worth Your Time (No Catch)

Granola joins your Zoom calls, takes notes, and transcribes everything automatically. After the meeting, you get a clean summary you can actually use.

What makes it useful: You can "talk to" your transcript—ask it questions, generate follow-up emails, or pull out action items. It also has customizable templates so your notes come out formatted the way you want them.

Try it for: Client calls, team meetings, or any conversation where you need to stay engaged instead of typing notes.

Set a keyboard shortcut, start talking, and Whisper Flow converts your speech to text anywhere on your computer—emails, documents, notes, whatever.

The clever part: It cleans up your words as it goes. If you stumble or restart a sentence, the output still reads smoothly. The free tier gives you 2,000 words per week, which is more than enough for most people.

Try it for: Drafting emails, capturing quick thoughts, or dictating notes when typing feels like a bottleneck.

This might be the most useful free AI tool available right now. Upload your documents—PDFs, notes, articles, even YouTube videos—and Notebook LM helps you search, summarize, and find connections across all of them.

It can generate mind maps, reports, even slide decks from your uploaded content. And unlike general AI chatbots, every answer is grounded in your actual documents with citations showing exactly where the information came from.

Try it for: Organizing research for a project, preparing for meetings by uploading relevant documents, or making sense of lengthy reports.

A simple collection of tools designed for when things feel too big or complicated. The standout feature is "Magic To-Do"—type in a project like "prepare quarterly budget presentation" and it breaks it down into individual steps automatically.

There's also a "Compiler" that turns stream-of-consciousness brain dumps into organized task lists. Type out everything swirling in your head, click a button, and get back something manageable.

Try it for: Breaking down projects that feel overwhelming, or converting scattered thoughts into a clear action plan.

Paste in dense or complicated text, click a button, and Napkin generates visual representations—diagrams, flowcharts, concept maps. Great for turning written explanations into something you can put in a presentation.

You can customize colors and fonts, and it offers multiple visual options for each piece of text so you can pick what works best.

Try it for: Creating presentation graphics, visualizing processes, or making complex information easier to understand.

Describe the steps of a workflow in plain language and MyMap builds a flowchart automatically. You can refine it by chatting—"add a decision point here" or "connect these two steps"—without manually dragging boxes around.

This is particularly valuable for documenting processes before deciding which parts to automate or delegate.

Try it for: Mapping out approval workflows, documenting standard procedures, or visualizing multi-step processes.

If you're already using Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sheets), this new tool lets you create automated workflows across all of them. Describe what you want in plain language, and it builds the workflow for you.

Example: "Every morning, summarize my unread emails and send the summary to Google Chat." Or "When I get an email from a specific client, draft a reply and save attachments to a specific Drive folder."

Try it for: Email management, calendar automation, or any repetitive task involving Google tools.

A powerful visual workflow builder that can connect almost anything—different apps, databases, AI models, custom scripts. The community edition is completely free if you host it yourself.

Fair warning: This is the most technical tool on this list. It requires some setup and is better suited for people who are comfortable with technology. But if you're ready to go deeper with automation, n8n is remarkably capable.

Try it for: Complex multi-step automations, connecting tools that don't normally talk to each other, or building custom AI workflows.

A podcast app that adds AI summaries to episodes. Before committing to an hour-long episode, read the key takeaways. While listening, save "snips" of important moments. The app pulls out notable quotes automatically.

Useful if you listen to podcasts for professional development but don't always have time to hear everything.

Try it for: Industry podcasts, interviews, or any audio content where you want the highlights without the full time commitment.

Send the same prompt to multiple AI models simultaneously and compare their responses side by side. Useful for understanding which AI works best for different types of questions, or when you want multiple perspectives on a problem.

Try it for: Testing which AI gives better answers for your specific needs, or getting diverse responses to the same question.