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🧰 The AI Tools I'm Betting On for 2026
Published about 2 months ago • 5 min read
🧰 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: my favourite (lesser-known) AI tools heading into 2026.
AI-powered apps are popping up everywhere, and it’s getting harder to tell the game-changers from the gimmicks. It feels like a new "AI wrapper" is launched every day.
So, this issue is about the tools I believe are already delivering real results and have even greater potential. And no, I’m not talking about ChatGPT. These are three lesser-known apps that are quietly changing how we can build, present, and create.
Plus: a brilliant SEO tool I couldn’t fit into our past SEO newsletter issue. A simple 3-minute rule to instantly boost your productivity. And the hilarious story of how Amazon's AI movie recaps started making things up.
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If you’ve ever had an idea for an app but lacked the coding skills to build it, Replit is one to watch. It’s a browser-based platform that lets you (vibe) code, collaborate, and deploy projects instantly.
It can act as your coding partner to accelerate development or even build entire apps from a simple prompt and a few follow‑up tweaks. We created a full-stack app (complete with a user interface, database, and user authentication) without touching a single line of code – check out the video above. Additionally, you can also add PayPal and Stripe to it to process payments and monetize your app.
It’s more technical than other AI App Builders I tried, so there’s a bit of a learning curve. But with that comes much more power and flexibility, including essentials like version control, which many simpler tools lack.
🛠️ Alternative to: GitHub Codespaces, Hostinger Horizons, Lovable
Let’s be honest: PowerPoint feels like a dinosaur – it already looked old 10 years ago. And while tools like Canva have made design easier, creating a compelling presentation still takes time – even if you use more modern apps. Gamma is changing that by integrating AI directly into the creation process.
You just feed it a topic or a document, and it generates a complete presentation for you – it even creates visuals to go along. Here’s how it works:
Start with a prompt (e.g.,"a presentation on the history of AI").
Gamma's AI generates an outline, content, and initial slide designs and color scheme.
Gamma will build the presentation.
You can then edit and refine the slides with simple text commands.
And if you’re a dinosaur at heart (aka a PowerPoint user), you can even export Gamma presentations to PPT.
🛠️ Alternative to: PowerPoint, Google Slides, Tome
We’ve all been there: you find the perfect image for your website or social media, but it’s tiny and pixelated. Stretching it just makes it worse. Upscale.media is a brilliantly simple tool that solves this exact problem.
It’s an AI-powered tool that does one thing and does it well: it enlarges and enhances your images (and video) without destroying the quality. Just upload your image, and its AI gets to work, intelligently filling in the details to increase resolution while keeping things sharp and clear.
I’ve mainly used it to rescue low-quality graphics and bring old screenshots back to life. It’s not always perfect, but it’s been useful most of the time. It also includes other tools, such as a background remover and a watermark remover.
I know, I know, we just had an SEO-themed newsletter. But I didn’t have space to include this gem, and it’s too good not to share. It's called SEOGets, and it’s a powerful all-in-one SEO and content marketing platform. Cai, our SEO expert, shared it with me a while back.
SEOGets helps you with everything from keyword insights and on-page SEO optimization to tracking your rankings, although it can’t fully replace traditional keyword research tools. It has an interesting approach: it pulls data directly from Google Search Console, while tools like Ahrefs or Semrush are essentially ‘guessing’ some of that data.
It comes with a generous free plan, which provides you with access to a surprising number of features without costing a dime (e.g., unlimited sites and brand tracking). The paid plans get a bit pricey, starting at $49 a month. I guess they are meant for heavy SEO users.
🛠️ Alternative to: Google Search Console, SEMrush
👉 Visit: seogets.com
💰 From $49/month | Generous free plan available
⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack
The 3-Minute Rule: a simple trick to instantly kill procrastination.
The concept, borrowed from productivity expert David Allen (source), is incredibly simple: if a task takes less than 2 or 3 minutes to complete, do it NOW.
Don’t write it down. Don’t schedule it for later. Don’t even think about it. Just get it done.
This applies to all those tiny tasks that clog up our to-do lists and mental space:
Replying to that quick email.
Filing a digital document.
Making that phone call you’ve been putting off.
Putting a cup in the dishwasher.
By handling these instantly, you prevent small things from piling up and creating a mountain of future work. It’s a tiny habit that keeps your mind clear and builds momentum for bigger tasks.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
Prime Video’s AI recap feature went hilariously off-script – literally.
In a push to enhance the viewing experience, Amazon rolled out AI-generated episode recaps for shows on Prime Video. There was just one problem: the AI started hallucinating key plot points (source).
The most glaring goof was for the hit show Fallout. The AI recap set a crucial flashback in the 1950s instead of the correct year, 2077, and completely misreported the season finale’s ending – ups. Viewers were left confused and, naturally, took to social media to ridicule the feature. Also, didn’t any of the show’s producers check the AI recap before airing it?
Amazon quietly yanked the AI recaps shortly after. It was a perfect and public reminder that even for Big Tech giants, AI isn’t always perfect and can still get things spectacularly wrong.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll dive into tools that can directly boost your online store’s sales or help you capture more leads for your business.
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