These new AI tools promise better videos, seamless meetings, and richer research

Generative AI is everywhere, whether it’s used as a cornerstone of a service, used to build apps, or employed to boost functionality within them. But with so many new products appearing all the time, which ones are worth checking out?

We’re here to help with a new regular series covering the best and freshest AI apps and services that you should know about.

Google Vids is perhaps the premier consumer AI video creation platform available to anyone with a dream they’d like to bring to life. It was pretty good before, allowing creators to develop brief clips for marketing reels and other use cases. But this month, Google issued an update that makes Vids far more useful for creating longer clips without sacrificing valuable time.

So what are the changes? For one, Veo now supports an Extend option that doubles the length of the traditionally 8-second AI-generated clips. More interestingly, Vids can generate multiple clips in parallel, offering greater flexibility when stitching compelling visual stories together.

Notably, to access these Vids changes, you’ll need to be on the Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription tier. Alternatively, Education, Enterprise, and Business users will also receive these nifty tools.

Other new AI apps and services you should know!

There are plenty of other great new AI apps and services out there, including:

I really like the idea of AI-infused meeting apps. After all, large team gatherings can get messy, especially if minutes aren’t recorded in a sensible, legible way. Granola tries to fix this problem.

At its core, the breakfast-titled AI product is a notepad specifically geared to prepare your meeting agenda beforehand and generate minutes during the event.

What I like in particular is its smart post-meeting enhancement feature. Regardless of how thin or verbose your scribblings are, Granola will use context cues from the meeting itself to flesh out those notes. And, of course, you can recall information from these meetings through the app’s built-in chat service.

Notably, Granola needs to be installed on your device to function. It supports macOS, Windows, and iOS, but we’re still waiting on an Android app.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, NotebookLM is by far my favorite AI tool and one that I use daily. The personal knowledge database is one I’ve used for numerous personal tasks, from comparing insurance quotes to housing my car’s digital manual. However, it’s no longer alone in this particular niche.

Saner.AI offers a challenger that extends far beyond local information recall alone. It aims to be a personal assistant of sorts, supports emails and traditional notes, including various document formats for import. It also plugs into your personal calendar, essentially setting up tasks based on the information it contains and the prompt you feed its AI chatbot.

I’ve found it particularly useful as a travel log, recording details that I’d otherwise forget for use when organizing return trips. However, there is lots of room for improvement. The app is pretty sluggish and pauses to load when switching screens. It’s also decidedly barebones compared to NotebookLM, lacking many of the multimedia features that come with Google’s product.

Finally, in the previous edition of this article series, I detailed Consensus, an AI chatbot that exclusively uses data from peer-reviewed papers to generate responses. It’s not the only option in this particular genre. Elicit also leverages scientific papers to respond to prompts, but it offers a few advantages over its rival.

For one, it packs a built-in bibliography tool. Users can save sources and organize them through a tagging system and within collections. This makes it easy to silo various research tasks. Then there’s the simpler visual presentation. Consensus can feel crowded and overwhelming, but Elicit clarifies the core focus of each paper it samples and offers a more comprehensive report of all the sources it discovers.

Notably, the free version allows surface-level searches, but premium options offer a few more tricks, like alerts for new research and the option to add even more sources per query.