Whenever I hear about artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, I think about Genie, the fictional character from Aladdin. AI assistants can grant us our productivity wishes, from handling routine chores to generating creative ideas; they use digital magic to make work and life smoother and more efficient.
Maybe you’ve heard about AI assistants or explored one or more of your own. The reality is that there are tons of ways to use these technologies. In this post, we share 12 ways to use an AI assistant and some apps to explore.
What is an AI assistant?
A definition and overview of AI assistants
Sometimes called virtual or digital assistants, AI assistants are software programs or technologies that do what they sound like—use artificial intelligence to assist users. These tools pair AI with natural language processing (NLP) to understand user requests and help with various tasks. They can help automate, streamline, and improve workplace and personal productivity by handling tasks like scheduling, workflow optimization, task management, content creation, and more.
The evolution of AI assistants
While AI assistants are at the forefront of artificial intelligence technologies today, they’ve been around longer than you might think. Most sources suggest that the first AI assistant dates back to the 1960s when Joseph Weizenbaum created Eliza. Weizenbaum created Eliza to explore communication between humans and machines by simulating conversations between a patient (the user) and a therapist (the bot).
Following Eliza, chatbots continued to emerge with the creation of Parry (1970s) and text-based AI chatbots for customer support and querying information (1980s-1990s). In the 2010s, a shift in the rise of assistive technologies occurred with the advent of AI voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant.
With the AI revolution, we see AI assistants in various shapes and sizes today, from immensely powerful AI chatbots to expanded voice-assistant capabilities and other productivity-centric AI tools that operate in an assistant-like manner behind the scenes.
Personal productivity
We all have tasks that need to be done to keep things moving, but we don’t always want to spend time completing them. That’s where personal productivity AI assistants can help.
1. Task management
It’s no secret that effective task management is the key to getting things done, but managing tasks can become time-consuming if we aren’t careful. Take, for example, kicking off a new project and needing to lay out a complete project plan, assign various workstreams, and set deadlines for project stakeholders. Many project and task management tools have AI assistant features that can help.
If you want to free up time to work on your tasks rather than spend too many precious minutes planning or delegating them, consider Asana. This AI work management platform can advise on strategic project planning efforts, automate task assignments, provide timely insights about a project, suggest edits, and more. (And there’s an Asana + Clockwise integration for seamless coordination!) Or try Wrike, a project management tool using Work Intelligence™ to help the team prioritize their most important work, identify historical project patterns, optimize resource allocation, and delegate actions with mobile voice commands.
2. Scheduling and reminders
It’s a busy world with responsibilities and commitments across workplaces, family lives, and friendships—coordinating schedules and remembering where you need to be and when can get messy. AI assistants can make this part of time management much more manageable.
Ohai is an AI assistant you can text or email that can add events to your calendar, set reminders for yourself and others, coordinate rides and tasks with others, plan meals, summarize emails, and record your to-do list.
Professional efficiency
Imagine having an extra hand to handle routine tasks at work so you can focus on the most critical functions that will make a big difference. That’s what professional efficiency-geared AI assistants can do for you.
3. Scheduling assistant
Our love for scheduling assistants is biased, but it’s for a good reason. Finding time to meet with your coworkers when schedules are packed can be problematic enough. Add in last-minute but much-needed meetings or the need to bulk reschedule your day due to parental duties for a sick kiddo, and your calendar can become a mess.
We can help. Meet Prism. Powered by the natural language processing capabilities of LLMs, Clockwise translates your calendar intent into its proprietary scheduling engine. This engine analyzes vast amounts of calendar data and calculates scheduling options based on your criteria. With this scheduling engine as its backbone, Prism can offer more scheduling options faster than any human can.
4. Email management
If you’re drowning in emails and want to get more organized but don’t have the time, an AI-powered email management tool can help you regain your sanity. SaneBox is like an AI executive assistant that helps users tackle email overload and remove unwanted interruptions. It uses machine learning algorithms to sort your incoming emails into different folders so you can focus on the most important ones (similar to built-in email filtering, but much more advanced).
5. Presentation maker
Whether you create presentations for internal training, meetings, sales pitches, or other scenarios, they can be a great way to translate information into digestible content for viewers and listeners. Presentations can also be rather time-consuming, especially when starting from scratch. No matter your use case, many AI technologies can aid presentation generation. Beautiful.ai provides modern-looking slide templates for brands and businesses to use. Presentations.ai is another great AI presentation maker for creating decks, infographics, charts, reports, and more via text-based prompts.
6. Research assistance
Want to enhance and speed up your research process? AI assistants for research support make it easier to quickly summarize complex research and locate the information you seek without clicking through multiple search results. Try Perplexity.ai, a conversational search engine that can answer your queries utilizing sources on the web for more condensed search engine results.
Enhanced communication
Effective communication is the lifeblood of all relationships and is a massive part of our workplaces. It can also help make conversations more inclusive and accessible for everyone involved.
7. Real-time translation
From an accessibility and inclusion perspective, real-time translation tools can be game-changers in opening up conversations to all participants. Wordly is an AI tool that provides live AI translation services for in-person, webinars, and video-recorded environments. It can provide translated audio, read translated subtitles and same-language captions, and access text transcripts with its two-way translation functionality.
8. Automated customer support
The introduction of chatbots paved the way for automated customer support. These tools provide customers with 24/7 access to assistance and resolve basic inquiries in seconds, improving the customer experience. They can reduce the need to dedicate human resources to provide essential customer support when appropriately used. That’s what a tool like Ada, an AI agent for customer service, can do for businesses with its relevant and accurate responses to customer inquiries.
Development
AI assistants streamline the development process, accelerate product timelines, and enable developers to focus on their projects' more complex and creative aspects.
9. Research assistance
AI assistants can streamline developers' research by sifting through vast technical documentation and resources. They can provide summaries, highlight key insights, and suggest relevant materials, allowing developers to focus on implementing solutions rather than searching for information. Use Elicit to search, extract, and analyze data from relevant research papers to identify themes and concepts across the research.
10. Coding generation
AI assistants can enhance coding productivity by generating code snippets, suggesting optimizations, and writing entire functions based on developer input. Of course, these tools might not always nail the code, but they can provide developers with a starting point from which to work. GitHub Copilot is a sidekick of sorts for developers. When stuck, you can ask GitHub Copilot to hunt down a bug, help design a new feature or improve code. Users can ask general questions and more specific ones related to their codebase.
Creative assistance
Whether you’re working on a time crunch or want to supplement your creative power, generative can help with some basic creativity-related tasks.
11. Writing and editing help
Suggesting improvements, correcting grammatical errors, and enhancing overall clarity are just a few ways AI assistants offer invaluable writing and editing support. They can help maintain a consistent tone and style, refine drafts, and provide constructive feedback, leading to polished and clear communications.
Grammarly’s AI writing assistant is at the top of the game. You can prompt it to rewrite for tone, length, and formality, ask it to generate text that sounds like you, use it to brainstorm ideas quickly and respond to emails with context-specific prompts. Another well-loved tool by writers, Hemingway Editor Plus, introduced AI capabilities for rewriting sentences and matching the user’s tone.
12. Content generation
There’s never been a better time to experiment with content creation in written formats, visuals, and videos. Jasper is the perfect tool for marketing professionals, as it supports teams in scaling up marketing content by assisting with blog writing, copywriting, content strategy, integrated campaigns, and search engine optimization (SEO). AI text-to-image generators like Midjourney and Adobe Firefly help turn visual descriptions into images for collateral and other materials.
The future of AI assistants
As AI progresses and technologies improve, AI assistants may become more human-like and personalized. Technologist Giuliano Liguori wrote, “The era of being misunderstood by our digital companions is coming to an end, making way for a future where AI can fully grasp the depth of human language and emotion.” And in September 2023, Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of Google's DeepMind, told CNBC that everyone will have their own chief of staff in the form of a virtual assistant within the next five years.
One thing is clear: AI assistants are here to stay and will continue influencing how we live and work. Explore ones that can fulfill your needs!
About the author
Alyssa Towns has written productivity and time management content for Clockwise for several years. Early in her career, she dove into time management strategies to effectively manage her workday calendar and 10+ C-Suite officers' calendars across various organizations. She uses her training in change management to write time management, the future of work, and career content that helps people change their behaviors and habits. In addition, she writes about artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology for G2's Learn Hub. When she isn't writing, Alyssa enjoys trying new restaurants with her husband, playing with her Bengal cats, adventuring outdoors, or reading a book from her TBR list.
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