The best AI tools in 2025

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have rapidly evolved, providing versatile solutions for various personal and professional tasks. From generating engaging content and streamlining research to automating code development and enhancing presentations, the tools available today are transforming how we work and create. In this article, I'll share a selection of AI-powered applications that I've personally tested and found particularly useful, categorized to help you navigate their functionalities effectively.

AI chatbots (LLMs)

ChatGPT: The most used! It gives access to very good models in terms of performance. We have access to several models (small and bigger, reasoning models) and with a lot of built-in features and agentic functionalities: web search, deep search, image generation (via DALL-E), adding of documents… It also has multimodal capabilities, meaning we can add other types of inputs than text, like images, and the same for the output. You can also configure your own GPT that will be personalized to your need or, of course, access the different models via the API.

I have used it for:

• Brainstorming (ideas of plan for articles, ideas of place to visit etc.)

• Summarize documents.

• Generate text based on my researches, notes… (for articles, LinkedIn or X posts…).

• Data analyses (excel or CSV files…).

• Code generation (Python scripts…).

• …

Claude: The best rival of OpenAI, it also provides very good models, especially for generating code! Here also, several models are accessible with different capacities. The main functionalities of ChatGPT are present! The main difference being on the multimodal capabilities that are only in. So, we can add an image as an input, but we can’t get an image as an output (apart from a very simple SVG generated code). Anthropic also gives access to its models via API.

I have used it for:

• Brainstorming (ideas of plan for articles, ideas of place to visit etc.)

• Summarize documents.

• Generate text based on my researches, notes… (for articles, LinkedIn or X posts…).

• Data analyses (excel or CSV files…).

• Code generation (Python scripts…).

Grok: The rival from xAI (Elon Musk), it also provides very good models! I have used it much less, but I do use its image generation capabilities when I want to create an image with a famous person in it, as other competitors are restricted to do it! The cool part is that it is accessible directly in X as well as a stand-alone app. The models are also accessible by API.

LeChat: The European competitor from Mistral. I have also used it much less, but I do use it sometimes to get a different « point of view » when brainstorming or writing something. The models are also accessible via API, and some models are open source and so accessible on Hugging Face or other platforms.

Open Source LLMs: Apart from Mistral, other companies are developing open source models, like Meta with its now famous Llama 3, DeepSeek with DeepSeek R1 or Alibaba with Qwen models for example. The best place to find open source models is definitively on Hugging Face or Ollama if you want to run it locally on your computer.

Research & summarization

Perplexity: Very powerful tool to do some internet research. You can ask a question and get a direct answer with citations based on its research. But, you still need to verify the information as it can rely on outdated information or mix-up some elements.

Notebook LLM: Best tool to summarize or research a big document, like a technical paper or research paper. You can provide the document(s) and then ask questions, or make it create a podcast based on it! I use it a lot with this functionality to listen to created podcasts in the transports, when working on something else etc.

Note-taking

Granola: It is my favorite note-taking app, as you can also write your own notes and the AI will emphasize on those. The only downside is that it is, for now, only working in English (French, Spanish and German to come).

There are a lot of other solutions, like Upmeet that supports several languages.

Presentation and visual creations

Gamma: One of the best tools to generate presentations. You can provide the content as text, just an idea or even a document, and it will generate a presentation with a theme that you choose! You can then edit and improve it. There are other tools to do that, I did not try yet, but heard good things about Presentation.ai.

Midjourney: They are specialized in visual and image creation, thus it’s one of the best to create high quality or artistic images! But, you have no free plan!

If you don’t need that high quality images, DALL-E via ChatGPT or Grok should be good enough.

Napkin.ai: Very cool and useful app to create graph from text for your presentations or visuals etc.

Process documentation

Guidde: If you need to create tutorials and explanations of processes of things to do in a software, website etc… This app will save you a lot of time as it will record what you are doing and then create a great document with each step, explanations, pictures etc.

AI coding

Lovable: It transforms user-described ideas (prompts) into fully functional applications with beautiful interfaces. It will allow you to create a prototype, Proof of Concept (POC) or even a “simple” app very fast and without software development knowledge!

Cursor: It is a, powerful, integrated development environment (IDE) that integrates AI-powered functionalities like: code completion and smart rewrites or predicting and suggesting multiple-line edits to improve coding efficiency and accuracy!

Replit AI: It also a kind of online IDE with an AI-powered coding assistant. It is capable of generating complete applications or features from your prompts, thus also simplifying the development process. You can also directly deploy from Replit.

Language

LanguageTool: I have it installed on my browser for a long time, and it’s a very practical tool to correct your writing in several languages. It is a must-have!

Otherwise, you can also use Grammarly.

DeepL: The best translator! Nothing else to add. You can now also use it to rewrite some text to improve it with an applied style etc.

Also, a new competitor to watch: widn.ai.

AI platforms

Botpress: If you need to deploy AI bots or AI agents, it is a very complete platform with a lot of channels to deploy the AI (text or voice) and a lot of integrations with AI providers or applications.

Competitors include Voiceflow or Chatbase (with a bit less options).

Eleven labs: The best voice and most complete AI platform: from creating a voice conversational AI to dubbing or translating a video or cloning your voice… you can do almost everything!

If you want platforms that are more specialized in Voice AI Agents, you have: Bland or Vapi.

Voice dictation

Flow: It is “simply” a speech to text tool, but very beautifully integrated to your computer! You can use it to talk wherever you can to write text and thus same time. And the AI will automatically clean up the written text of your oral hesitations, repetitions, “uh's” etc. Can’t wait for the mobile app!

Conclusion

The AI tools presented here reflect just a fraction of the possibilities available today. Whether you're seeking efficient ways to generate creative content, manage documentation, enhance coding productivity, or improve your daily workflow, these applications offer powerful and accessible solutions. The AI landscape is rapidly evolving, and I'm always eager to discover more. If you have any favorite AI tools not mentioned here, feel free to share your recommendations!

And if you need help for your AI projects, or to deploy a tool, contact us!