There are just SO MANY apps out there!

Generic AI apps: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity

AI study/note-taking apps: NotebookLM, Notion, Obsidian, Goodnotes, Notability

I personally just use ChatGPT projects to track everything and don’t like NotebookLM - UI feels less intuitive to me.

Curious what apps other people are using and why?

Just curious if some of you use some kind of artificial intelligence for studying and what kind of ingenious ways you implement. I read there's some sort of AI to summarize books, articles of videos but I don't know how they're called

Hey,

I recently started to study computer science and it's, who could've known, pretty hard. Such a high workload and everything is pretty complicated, esp maths and theoretical computer science.

Now I want to use AI for assistance and I'm willing to pay like 20 bucks a months for it like for ChatGPT. Can you guys tell me which one's the best for my use case? I didn't follow the dev of AI in the past months. I just heard that Claude is pretty decent and better in some cases than ChatGPT. I know that GPT 5 is going to be announced soon but no one knows when. Can you guys help me? I need a math tutor, maybe some help in coding and help to sum up the PDFs of my profs and search for specific information in it (+ get an explanation for things I don't understand).

As an college student and co-founder of AI Scout, I've reviewed almost 1000 AI tools submitted to our directory. While most are geared towards business and freelancers, I've come across several tools that university students may find quite useful (aside from ChatGPT).

Before I get started, I feel like I should mention that like ChatGPT, none of these should completely replace human thought and work. Rather, they work best when they supplement your learning. Use these tools wisely and your education will thank you for it.

AI Tools for Academic Papers/Research

• Consensus:
  Great for doing background research and gathering sources. It's essentially a search engine, powered by AI, that gets its information from actual research papers. Simply input a question and Consesus returns relevant findings, as well as the source, abstract, and a link to the full text. For certain sources it will also provide you with a quick tag, for instance Consensus will let you know if its a rigorous journal or highly cited. What I find really useful personally is the ability to cite these texts directly. The tool is free.

• Semantic Scholar:
  Very similar to Consensus, however it offers the feature to save papers to an online library and provide AI recommendations based on the ones you have saved. Furthermore, it can alert you whenever new relevant papers become available. This is also a free tool.

• Genei:
  This is a great tool to use for generating the first drafts of your papers after finding relevant sources. You simply create a project, upload your sources, and the AI extracts key information from your articles into notes. It's GPT 3.5 integration can then expand these notes into full writing. Also worth nothing- Genei handles citations automatically. While its around $5/mo for access, you can get a free 2 week trial. They also offer a similar AI tool for qualitative analysis called CoLoop.

Learning Assistant

• Google Socratic:
  Helps with understanding and how to solve specific questions for multiple subjects, including science, math, English, and humanities. You can ask any question into the microphone and Socratic will return a visual step by step explanation. It's available as a mobile app for Android and iOS

• Perplexity AI:
  Similar to ChatGPT, however it has access to the internet. It's free and available as a web app, browser extension, and mobile app

Train ChatGPT on Your Own Documents

• ChatPDF:
  Simply upload any PDF and ChatPDF will instantly create a GPT3.5 chatbot based on the content of your document. However, its limited to text based content at the moment and may have trouble parsing tables. In addition, you are limited to chatting with a single PDF file for one chat. However, you do get 3 free PDF chats on their free plan.

• Chatbase:
  Similar to ChatPDF however it offers way more functionality and acts more as a generative AI like ChatGPT. We use this at AI Scout for our AI assistant to find AI tools. You can upload multiple files to train a single chatbot, including PDF, txt, docx, and URLs. While its more geared towards business use, its quite useful if you are a student as well. One thing I have noticed with Chatbase is that it may hallucinate (i.e. make up information if it can't find anything relevant within your documents). However you can play around with the model settings and base prompt to prevent this; it's powered by GPT 3.5. You do receive 30 free messages with your chatbot by signing up.

• MyAskAI:
  Similar tool to Chatbase, however it's less of a generative AI tool but rather geared towards finding specific information from your documents (it still gives either a short or long summary of the relevant search results). Theres a free forever plan available that allows you to upload 3 pieces of content and ask 50 questions a month.

Lecture Assistants (Ask for Permission from Lecturers Before Using)

• MeetGeek:
  Awesome for any online lectures- MeetGeek automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes for you. It works with Zoom and Teams. Once again this is a tool more geared towards professional use, but it might come useful if you are attending online school and want an AI replacement for note taking. Free plan available

• OtterPilot:
  Pretty much the same as MeetGeek- just another good alternative for the same purpose. Has a free plan available as well.

*** You should ask for permission from your instructors prior to using this as both MeetGeek and OtterPilot will be appear as a "person" in the meeting.

Other Useful Tools

• YouTube Summary with ChatGPT:
  If any of your professors like to make you learn from YouTube videos, this is a great one to save time. It's a free Chrome extension that automatically transcribes and summarizes any YouTube video. Keep in mind it requires you to use your own API key from OpenAI, however the cost will be quite cheap.

• Lumelixr.ai:
  Great for engineering students, especially if you do a lot of work with Excel. Instead of having to Google excel formulas and spend time sifting through search results for a solution, this extension allows you to describe what you want to do in natural language and AI will provide a formula for you. They offer a 7 day free trial and its available as a web app and browser extension

• GPT for Sheets and Docs:
  Good "quality of life" tool- allows you to use ChatGPT right inside Google Sheets and Docs. Avaialble as a Google Docs/Sheets extension