🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.

This week: let’s make content creation a little less draining with some AI magic.

It’s that time of year, isn’t it? The end-of-year finish line is in sight, and frankly, I’m tired. The thought of tackling the same repetitive tasks is enough to make me want to trade my keyboard for a tennis racket.

If you’re feeling the burnout too, you’re not alone. So this week, I’m sharing three AI-powered tools that can help lighten the load, automate the boring stuff, and give you back some precious time for the things that matter.

Plus: a surprisingly simple tool to manage your data, a look at the future of online security, and a slightly terrifying story about an AI Assistant gone wrong.

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Grammarly (Now with AI)

AI Text Generation

When I first tried Grammarly, it blew my mind. But then I discovered LanguageTool, which could check my spelling in multiple languages, and I never looked back.

But it seems things have changed.

Grammarly has gone all-in on AI and is now a powerhouse for much more than just catching my typos and errors.

It’s not just a grammar checker anymore; it’s a full-blown AI writing partner. It can help you brainstorm ideas, rewrite sentences for clarity, adjust your tone, and even generate entire drafts from a simple prompt.

What’s great is that they’ve kept a very generous free plan – not many AI solutions have a free tier – which includes up to 100 AI prompts per month. If you need more, paid plans start at an affordable $12 a month. If you haven’t tried it in a while, it’s definitely worth another look.

🛠️ Alternative to: LanguageTool, ProWritingAid, Jasper

👉 Visit: grammarly.com

💰 From $12/month | Free plan available

Sora

AI Image Generation

You’ve most likely read me moan about ChatGPT’s image and video generation. Not because the results are bad, but mainly because it just takes forever to generate them compared to Gemini. Still, if you’re not in a rush, it’s not a bad tool.

With OpenAI’s Sora, you can create high-quality images and videos. You get to decide on the aspect ratio (3:2, 1:1, or 2:3), use presets like Film Noir or Pixel Art, and even add an image as the base for your media.

Sora can create videos up to 25 seconds long (that is a lot), and you can pick between 480p, 720p, or 1080p resolution (depending on your plan). One thing I love is you can ask for more than one video from the same prompt, for example up to 4, and then decide which one you like best. AI generation rarely gets it right the first time.

The storyboard function is perfect for longer videos where you want to add a bit of a plot. You can create prompts or add images to build your scenes. I’m excited to see how this feature develops.

🛠️ Alternative to: Stock video sites, traditional video production

👉 Visit: openai.com/sora

💰 ChatGPT Account | Free plan available

Bannerbear

AI Banner Generation

Creating visuals for social media can be a huge time-sink, especially when you need to produce a high volume of content. Bannerbear offers a unique solution by generating banners for you with AI. It’s a tool that lets you generate thousands of image and video variations from a single template.

🤓 Geek alert: This tool relies on APIs to automate your social media campaign visuals. So you won’t need to be a complete nerd, but you do have to be OK using platforms like Zapier, Make.com or n8n.

Here’s how it works:

You design a template that you can reuse for your socials, for example an Instagram post format that a food blogger would reuse to share recipes.
Then you connect it to a Google Sheet using Zapier – or you could use other combinations of tools.
You add the information for your new banner in the Google Sheet.
Bearbanner creates your visual from the information you entered using the previous template you set up.
You upload the final creation on your social media.

It’s a smart solution, and I think can be very useful for those creating a few images for social media. However, if you don’t post more than 10 or 15 images a month, Bannerbear isn’t worth it.

🛠️ Alternative to: Canva, Figma, manual design work

👉 Visit: bannerbear.com

💰 From $49/month | Free trial available, no free plan

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

Supabase

One of the most boring (and intimidating) parts of building any kind of app or side project is dealing with databases. I once tried to learn SQL, and it was a horrid experience. But what if you could manage a powerful database without writing a single line of code?

That’s where Supabase comes in. It’s a no-code-friendly platform that makes creating and managing a professional-grade database fairly simple. You can use their cloud service or even host it on your own server for complete control – e.g. with a Hostinger VPS.

What’s really cool is that it’s built to be AI-ready too. Supabase makes it easy to create vector databases – the kind that AI models like and use to store and retrieve information. So it’s perfect for creating no-code AI automation workflows (e.g. with n8n or similar).

I know this might sound a bit technical for this newsletter, but I wanted to share it so you know that powerful, user-friendly tools for managing databases exist, just in case you ever decide to geek out.

🛠️ Alternative to: Firebase, Amazon RDS, learning SQL

👉 Visit: supabase.com

💰 From $25/month | Free plan available

⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack

Passwords are a pain. They’re either too simple to be secure (as you’ll see in this week’s Plot Twist) or too complex to remember. But what if I told you they’re on their way to the graveyard?

Meet passkeys, the ~~future~~ present of logging in.

So, what are they? Think of a passkey as a unique digital key that’s stored securely on your device (like your phone or computer). Instead of typing a password each time, you simply use your fingerprint, face, or a PIN to prove it’s you. It’s like unlocking your phone – quick, easy, and much more secure.

Each passkey is actually a pair of keys: one public (which the website has) and one private (which never leaves your device). They only work together, which means that even if a hacker steals a website’s data, they can’t log into your account. It makes phishing almost impossible.

You can start using passkeys today on sites like Google, Apple, and more. It’s a small change that makes a huge difference in your online security.

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

When AI automation goes rogue, it really goes rogue. Security testers recently discovered a massive flaw in McDonald’s AI-powered chatbot for job applicants (source). The chatbot would spill the personal data of anyone who had ever applied for a job – all you had to do was enter the world’s most popular (and weakest) password: “123456”.

The result? The private information of 64 million people was exposed. We’re talking names, phone numbers, email addresses, and more. Not exactly a Happy Meal.

Sometimes, the biggest threats aren't sophisticated hackers, but a simple, dumb password.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, to complement this issue, we'll look at 3 platforms to create videos and images with AI, cheaply and at scale.

Cheers,

Josep

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