8 Ways AI Can Help You Every Day

AI can be quite useful.

AI agents or chatbots are all the rage. Names like CoPilot, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are likely to be familiar.

These tools use artificial intelligence to mimic human interaction. As they have access to a huge corpus of training data and often have direct access to the web, they manifest amazing abilities.

Some of those abilities can be extremely useful even to the casual computer user.

Tools and examples

Throughout this article, I’ll be using the free versions of Microsoft CoPilot, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.ai for most of my examples. For ChatGPT, you don’t have to create a free account, but in my experience, the results are better if you do.

In general, the concepts below apply to most of the current crop of AI chatbots and agents, but this is a quickly evolving space, and things can and will change at any time.

1. Summarize lengthy content

This is probably 75% of how I use AI. I’ll take a lengthy article that I don’t want to take the time to read and ask for a summary I can use to make my decision of whether or not to read the whole thing.

I’ll use my email-forwarding article as an example. I opened CoPilot (which is ever-present in Edge) and clicked on its “Summarize this page” button, which is the equivalent to asking the question circled: “Summarize the main points on this page.” The response is 217 words.

That’s a bit long. So I asked, “Please summarize in 50 words or fewer.”

That would be a little more useful to my decision-making process.

2. Reword the complex

This is a use I don’t think many people are aware of.

Normally, in my CoPilot chat session above, I’d next ask, “Please rewrite the article using an 8th grade vocabulary.” Unfortunately, CoPilot won’t do that due to copyright concerns. Even a copy/paste of the article into the copilot.microsoft.com website won’t work.

So I switched to ChatGPT.com. I typed the following:

Please rewrite this article using an 8th grade1 vocabulary:

and then copy/pasted the text of the article into the chat.

The result was a slight re-write to meet an 8th-grade vocabulary level. I went further and requested it in a 4th-grade vocabulary level. You can read the result here.

Have you ever heard or seen of ELI5, or “Explain it Like I’m 5”? I also asked, “Please rewrite this article using vocabulary appropriate for a five-year-old.” The results were impressive, though there are some unavoidable tech terms: probably not many five-year-olds have “POP3” in their lexicon.

If you run into content on the internet that seems too dense or complex, AI summaries and rewrites can help make things more understandable.

3. Read YouTube videos

This is similar to the preceding point, but it’s worth calling out.

I don’t always have the patience to sit through a video to see if it’s what I want. AI to the rescue.

There are several services that summarize YouTube videos (Krisp.io and Readwise Reader are two I use). But even without those tools, we can do it for free.

Visit your favorite video on YouTube and copy its transcript. Now, in your AI chatbot, enter “Please summarize this video transcript in 50 words or fewer”, followed by the transcript itself. I did this for my video on removing OneDrive and got this from ChatGPT.

Leo Notenboom explains how to safely disable or uninstall OneDrive from your PC without affecting your online files. He recommends first unlinking the account, then uninstalling the app if needed, and clarifies that the OneDrive folder remains as a regular, harmless folder.

Let’s say you’re not a video-watching person, but you’d still like the content from the video. In your AI chatbot, enter, “Please turn this video transcript into a full article with correct grammar and remove any verbal static.”

The result begins with “Sure! Here’s a polished and grammatically correct article version of the video transcript with filler words and verbal static removed”, followed by a full article you can read here. It’s pretty decent.

ChatGPT then offers more: “Let me know if you want a downloadable PDF or a version with screenshots added!”

4. Get answers to badly worded questions

One of the neat things about AI is that it does a much better job of “understanding” vague questions or questions where terminology is off the mark. This makes it a great place to ask questions and get answers.

In a random made-up example, I asked Perplexity:

There was a character on a sci-fi show that lasted only one season but had a single movie sequel that was killed suddenly by some kind of alien pincer through the chest. Who was that, and what were the show and movie titles?

Perplexity answered my question and corrected my memory in the process (spoiler!).

Based on your description, it seems like you might be thinking of a character similar to Hoban “Wash” Washburne from the TV series “Firefly” and its movie sequel, “Serenity”. However, Wash was not killed by something through the chest while piloting a spaceship; he was impaled by a Reaver spear after crash-landing the Serenity near a broadcast tower.[3]

Note the “[3]”, which is a link to a citation for the source Perplexity used for this answer.

Not only is that the correct answer to my horribly worded question, but I also learned Wash’s first name.

5. Translate badly worded questions

This might be a niche use, but it relates directly to what I do for a living: answering questions.

Every so often, I get a question that can most politely be termed as a missive, including paragraph after paragraph of backstory with lots of details sprinkled in. Sometimes there’s an explicit question, but often there’s not. The person asking has put a lot of effort into it, thinking they’ve expressed their needs, but if you look closely, there’s nothing phrased as a question.

I don’t have an example I feel comfortable sharing, but it’s not uncommon for me to head over to ChatGPT and ask:

What is this person trying to ask, and what are the relevant details?

followed by the lengthy “question”. ChatGPT is good at sifting through the word salad to give me what I need: the question in a form I can answer.

6. Get answers to tech questions

In theory, this could put me out of a job, but AI is pretty good at answering technical questions. In fact, I’ve gone so far as to copy/paste error message text into Perplexity and have it summarize what the error means with suggestions as to what to do about it. As one example, I just “asked” Perplexity:

0xc00000e

That’s it. No question, no context, no nothing. It responded beginning with:

To resolve the 0xc00000e boot error in Windows, follow these structured troubleshooting steps:

This was followed by eight things to try and a short list of common causes of the problem.

You can ask AI questions without worrying if the terms you’re using are correct or even sensible. AI has shown an amazing ability to make sense of it and at least get you pointed in a helpful direction.

7. Write better emails (and questions)

You can use AI chatbots to polish and clarify your communications with anyone. For example, I gave ChatGPT the question I asked about a sci-fi character’s death and asked it to “Make this question clearer”. The result:

“Which character from a one-season sci-fi TV show was killed by an alien pincer through the chest in a movie sequel? What were the names of the TV show and the movie?”

Note that it didn’t try to correct me — the alien pincer is still in there — it simply improved the wording and clarity.

Another approach is tone. For example:

Please write a polite but sternly worded short email asking someone for the TPS report they have due. I’ve asked them repeatedly and they’ve completely ignored me, and it’s getting frustrating.

Perhaps my tendency would be to throw some inappropriate profanity in my email, but knowing that’s probably not a great idea, I’ll let ChatGPT take the wheel. Its suggestion:

Subject: Final Reminder: TPS Report Due

Hi [Name],

I’ve followed up multiple times regarding your TPS report, and I still haven’t received it. This report is overdue and your lack of response is becoming a serious concern.

Please send it to me by the end of today without further delay.

Let me know if there’s a problem, but silence is no longer acceptable.

Best,
[Your Name]

Definitely better than my version would have been.

AI can be useful any time you’re trying to communicate complex ideas to someone else or need help with tone (or just about any other characteristic of your communication). Just make certain that the result says what you intend to say.

8. Ask annoying questions

When you’re learning to understand something, it’s not uncommon to have lots of questions. If you’re dealing with a real person, they may get frustrated and impatient.

Not so with AI. AI doesn’t get tired or impatient.

Want to learn how to do something? Start with a question. Don’t understand the answer or uncover something that has you puzzled? Ask more questions.

Keep asking.

In fact, that might be the key to it all: don’t be afraid to ask AI questions — including questions about itself. I asked Perplexity, “What else can you do?”, and got even more ideas. Perplexity responded:

I can assist with a wide range of tasks and provide information on various subjects. Here are some examples of what I can do:

1. Answer Questions: I can answer questions on history, science, technology, literature, and more.
2. Provide Definitions: I can define words and explain concepts.
3. Translate Text: I can translate text from one language to another.
4. Summarize Content: I can summarize articles, books, or other written content.
5. Generate Text: I can generate text based on a prompt or topic.
6. Offer Suggestions: I can suggest books, movies, or other media based on your interests.
7. Explain Concepts: I can explain complex concepts in simple terms.
8. Provide Recipes: I can share recipes and cooking tips.
9. Help with Language Learning: I can assist with language learning by providing grammar explanations and practice exercises.
10. Create Lists: I can create lists of items based on specific criteria.
11. Provide Study Tips: I can offer tips for studying and learning more effectively.
12. Discuss News and Trends: I can discuss current news and trends in various fields.

If you have a specific task or question in mind, feel free to ask!

Postscript: Which one?

There are so many AI offerings right now that it can be hard to know which one to use for what.

For general chat, any of the most common will do. ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini, Claude, and others are all, I’ll just say, similar. You may find one more to your liking than the others based on how you use it.

That being said, here are the AI tools I currently use most.

• I normally use Kagi.com for a traditional search engine, but if my search is more like a semi-formed question, Perplexity is where I go.
• For my article summaries and anything that involves transforming text (rewrites, etc.), ChatGPT remains the most comfortable for me.
• I use ChatGPT’s new image-generating feature and also use it to access DALL-E 3. I keep trying other image-generation AIs but keep coming back to those two.

An honorable mention goes to Straico, which allows you to use multiple AIs at the same time. For example, when I summarize an article, I can run the same operation against ChatGPT and Claude simultaneously and pick the result I like the most. Straico has access to dozens of different AIs and is a great tool to use if you want to experiment with them.

I have paid plans for all of these, but most have free tiers as well.