How to boost your productivity with AI

Deep dive into better productivity with AI

Here are some leading AI-powered productivity tools designed to enhance every facet of your workday, helping you regain focus and reclaim free time.

Let AI help polish your writing

We've all faced the dreaded blinking cursor, struggling to find fresh ideas for a project, a catchy social media phrase, or even just the right way to start an email. Often getting started is the hardest part. However, by providing instant starting points and AI-generated perspectives, AI tools shatter writer's block, turning creative roadblocks into minor bumps.

ChatGPT

For writing, generative AI is like having a muse on call. Think of ChatGPT as a tireless brainstorming partner: feed it a topic and request outlines, different angles, or compelling headlines.

Aria, Opera’s AI

When you need composing assistance directly within your browser, Opera's browser AI, Aria, resides conveniently in your Opera browser sidebar. It offers quick ideas, rephrases sentences, or drafts replies based on your current webpage, keeping your workflow uninterrupted.

Jasper and Copy.ai

For crafting persuasive marketing messages, specialized tools like Jasper or Copy.ai analyze patterns in successful content to help you generate effective copy that resonates.

Workflow automation and task management with AI

Think about those essential but mind-numbing tasks: copying data, sending standard follow-up emails, and organizing files. These activities chip away at your time and mental energy. Fortunately, AI and automation platforms are brilliant at taking these over.

Zapier and Make

Services like Zapier and Make act as digital connectors, linking your favorite apps (like Gmail, Slack, or Trello) to automate multi-step workflows. These can be triggered by specific events – imagine automatically saving invoice attachments or adding new leads to a spreadsheet.

Adobe Scan

AI also makes individual apps smarter; sophisticated document scanners like Adobe Scan use AI to recognize text automatically, while email clients leverage AI to intelligently sort your inbox. Reclaiming hours once lost to mindless clicking frees up invaluable mental energy for complex problem-solving.

Scheduling & reminders: time-saving remedies

Juggling meetings, deadlines, and personal appointments is a constant challenge, and the mental effort of remembering everything can be draining. AI can step in to alleviate this burden, expertly organizing your day into manageable segments. This allows you to stop worrying about accidentally missing that important exam, dentist’s appointment, or even just watering your thirsty plants.

Voice Assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa)

To manage your schedule and set crucial reminders without disrupting your current task, voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are incredibly effective. Imagine you're busy with a hands-on task and suddenly remember a meeting; instead of stopping everything, you can just say "Hey Google, schedule a team sync for Thursday at 10 AM," and it's done. Similarly, quick verbal commands like "Siri, remind me to call a client back at 3 PM" or "Alexa, set a timer for my 25-minute focus block" offload the mental burden of tracking these details.

Calendly

The Calendly scheduling app accesses a user's calendar and their defined preferences to show their actual availability to others. When a time is selected, the system automatically creates the meeting event and sends details to all participants.

Todoist and Motion

Advanced to-do list AI apps like Todoist or Motion incorporate sophisticated algorithms, using AI principles, to help prioritize your tasks and anticipate schedule conflicts, leading to a calmer, more controlled workflow with less mental overhead.

Summaries for swift understanding

Feeling overwhelmed by information? Long reports, dense articles, and hour-long meeting recordings can be challenging to digest efficiently. Here’s how AI can help you with that.

Aria AI

Aria, Opera’s built-in browser AI, helps you quickly make sense of web content without leaving your current page, thanks to the Page Context mode feature. When faced with a lengthy article or document, Aria can summarize it directly in the browser’s sidebar or in a convenient pop-up.

Otter.ai and Descript

For individuals who frequently engage with audio from meetings, interviews, or lectures, AI tools like Otter.ai and Descript offer significant utility. They provide real-time transcription of spoken content and employ AI to generate summaries. These summaries often highlight key decisions and action items, enabling users to review essential information efficiently without listening to entire recordings.

Effortless research

Online searches often involve sifting through numerous links to find relevant information. Conversational AI, particularly when connected to the live web, provides a more direct path to answers.

Aria, browser AI

Instead of merely providing links, Opera's Aria AI can synthesize information from multiple sources to deliver direct, sourced answers to complex questions. Whether you're delving into a research paper or searching for product reviews, asking Aria a question while browsing transforms research from a time-consuming trawl into an efficient, real-time dialogue.

Perplexity AI

Dedicated AI search engines like Perplexity AI take a similar approach and synthesize information from multiple sources to provide direct, sourced answers to complex questions, streamlining your research process.

Communicate like a pro with polished emails & presentations

Writing well takes time. Whether composing an email, responding to a customer, or building a presentation, clarity and impact are crucial. AI tools are increasingly becoming invaluable writing partners, helping people communicate more effectively and confidently.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a widely used tool for those who write regularly. Beyond correcting grammar, it helps refine writing to sound more natural and polished. It can suggest adjustments to tone and rephrase sentences for clarity, ensuring your message is conveyed as intended.

Opera’s Aria AI

While browsing, if you need to quickly compose a response, Aria can help generate a draft and refine it. It's particularly useful for drafting emails, replies, or short-form content on the fly, eliminating the need to switch apps or second-guess your wording.

Tome and Gamma

Tome and Gamma can assist with presentation creation by generating slides with structure, content, and even relevant visuals. While not a replacement for creativity, they provide a fast, functional foundation, potentially saving hours of formatting and rewriting.

Image generation on demand

Whether you're designing a pitch deck, creating social media content, or updating your website, good images matter. The problem is that making those visuals from scratch can be time-consuming - and hiring a designer isn’t always an option. That’s where AI image generators come in.

Midjourney and DALL-E 2

Want a watercolor-style robot in a library? A minimalist landscape with purple mountains? You can type your idea, and the Midjourney and DALL-E 2 generate a high-quality image that matches. Each tool has its strengths - Midjourney is known for artistic textures, and DALL-E 2 aims for realism.

Opera’s Aria

With Aria built into Opera, you can generate high-quality images for free from text prompts. It's a simple way to bring visual ideas to life, without needing to create an account or signing up. You can request edits for generated images and easily copy or share the high-resolution pictures directly from the Opera browser.

Battle digital distractions with AI

Even with all the right tools, one of the hardest things to manage is your own attention. Distractions come at you from every direction - chat messages, news notifications, tempting new videos to watch - and they add up, pulling you out of focus again and again. AI can’t remove distractions completely, but it can help you block them or work around them more intentionally.

Freedom and Cold Turkey Blocker

Freedom and Cold Turkey Blocker can help you create boundaries by letting you schedule downtime from certain websites or apps. You can block social media for an hour, silence email notifications for a morning, or block everything except work tools during a deep-focus session.

RescueTime

RescueTime takes a more analytical approach by tracking how you spend your time online and using AI to identify behavioral patterns. It can gently nudge you when you drift towards distractions and highlight your most focused periods. Over time, it fosters awareness of your habits, offering data-backed suggestions to improve productivity and protect your focus.

Ready to launch your AI productivity journey?

Start small by picking one or two areas where you feel the most stuck - whether it's writing, scheduling, research, or repetitive tasks. Try a free, versatile AI tool like Opera's Aria or ChatGPT. Experiment, see what fits you, and integrate it gradually.

Think of these AI tools not as replacements, but as enhancers - handling the mundane and accelerating your workflow, so you can focus your unique human intelligence on what truly matters.