Nine AI tools for journalists to try this summer

Credit: Dinu J Nair on Unsplash

Summer is the season of ice creams, Aperol and out-of-office replies. While everyone else seems to be living it up on exotic beaches (and for whatever reason you are not), swap the sunscreen for your computer screen and try these nine AI-powered tools.

Hemingway App

What is it? Tool to improve readability and conciseness.

How can I use it? AI will probably not turn you into Hemingway but it will spotlight lengthy and dense sentences, needlessly fancy words, passive tone of voice and other writing sins to help you craft a more impactful article.

Story SpinnerAI

What is it? Chatbot that provides new content ideas to match your users’ needs

How can I use it? Journalists can use the chatbot to simply paste in a topic they want to cover, and the chatbot will suggest how to cover it appealing to all six user needs (update me, help me, educate me, give me perspective, inspire me and divert me). We wrote more about it here.

Wordsmith

What is it? A natural language generation platform that turns data into written narratives.

How can I use it? Wordsmith can write text when connected to any data set. This is great for sports result coverage, personalised messages for readers, reports or election coverage.

Trint

What is it? Transcription tool that converts audio and video files into text.

How can I use it? Quickly transcribe interviews and speeches in more than 40 languages. You can also verify, playback and search transcripts, pull quotes and create new articles, podcasts, scrips and soundbites.

QuillBot

What is it? Paraphrasing, summarisation and plagiarism-checking tool.

How can I use it? We do NOT recommend using the paraphrasing tool to steal your peers’ work but it comes in handy when you want to improve, condense, summarise or rephrase your own writing. You can also analyse articles for plagiarism and AI-written content.

Scribbr

What is it? Content generation tool.

How can I use it? Although it is mainly aimed at academia, the tool is useful for brainstorming and speeding up the writing process. It also helps you generate efficient and ethical Chat GPT prompts so you can learn to use it properly.

DeepL Translator

What is it? Highly accurate translation tool.

How can I use it? It is useful for journalists working with multilingual sources and content. You can also use it to translate content for your international audience but, as always, proceed with caution as no tool is 100% accurate.

Grammarly

What is it? Writing assistant that helps with grammar, style, tone, and clarity.

How can I use it? No AI can replace a good editor but Grammarly comes pretty close. Use it to spotlight errors, suggest improvements and even rewrite your whole text if you fancy.

Adobe Podcast Studio

What is it? Platform to record, edit and enhance audio with AI (still in beta)

How can I use it? Use AI to get the best set up with your microphone and touch up your voice recording sound as to sound more professional. Audio producer Phill Brown offered some handy first impressions as an early user of the tool on his LinkedIn.

AI disclaimer: We used ChatGPT to generate some suggestions for this human-written article.

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