The following is my ongoing collection of lesser-known resources I'll often go to instead of ChatGPT. Sometimes they work better for specific use cases or they provide a very different kind of service that ChatGPT isn't quite tuned for. ## Perplexity.ai and Phind.com ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.22.58 AM.png]] These tools are great for getting information that is generated like ChatGPT but with footnoted sources. I also find they work well for questions that require up-to-date knowledge. At the time of this writing, that's a limitation of ChatGPT that may not last long given the recent announcement of plugins. Responses are also typically brief and to the point. Similar to ChatGPT, you can ask followup questions without needing to restate the context. They will also show you similar questions or different variations of asking the same question. * [Perplexity](https://perplexity.ai) * [Phind](https://phind.com) Perplexity also has an excellent browser extension allowing you to use the service in the same way, or interact with the domain or page to ask questions or produce a summary. ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.47.02 AM.png]] ## macOS Summarizer ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.31.56 AM.png]] [macOS Summarizer](https://appleinsider.com/inside/macos/tips/how-to-use-summarize-in-macos-to-shorten-documents) is great for anyone needing to summarize while being restricted by the use of cloud-based tools or if you want tight controls on the privacy of the information being summarized. It's a tool loaded by default on every mac but hard to find. It works less by generating new text and more by pruning text away from the full text to get down to the essential parts of the text. Because everything runs locally, it also doesn't need an internet connection. ## Kagi ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.22.12 AM.png]] [Kagi](https://kagi.com) is a paid search engine with a [recently announced set of features](https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/kagi-ai.html) powered by AI. You can summarize the whole page of search results, the contents of a single search result (without visiting it), and have a conversation with a search result (again, without needing to visit it). ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.49.28 AM.png]] ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.48.52 AM.png]] They've also released a ["Universal Summarizer"](https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html) that can summarize links, YouTube videos, podcasts, PDFs, tweets, and books. It also caches those summaries so if you summarize anything another user has already requested, it will load instantly and won't count against your monthly quota. Note the token limit for Kagi's US is very high, and overall less expensive per token than ChatGPT, especially considering caching. ### Klavier ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.38.20 AM.png]] For a free alternative to Kagi's feature to talk to links, Klavier works great and supports txt, docx, and PDF file uploads as well as links. Cheating a little here because this probably uses OpenAI services to generate responses. ### Summarize.tech ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.39.42 AM.png]] For a free(mium) tool to summarize YouTube Videos, check out [Summarize.tech](https://summarize.tech). ## Long summarize a book using your eyeballs and your brain The following is essentially just skimming a book in a very specific way using the following algorithm: For each chapter: 1. Read the entire first paragraph of each chapter. 2. Read the first sentence of each paragraph that follows. 3. Read the entire first paragraph of the last paragraph of the chapter. 4. Continue doing this for each chapter until you've reached the end of the book. ## Quillbot ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 9.28.00 AM.png]] [Quillbot](https://quillbot.com) has been around a while and does a great job at paraphrasing and summarizing. More recently they expanded their product's functions for checking plagiarism, checking grammar in multiple languages, translating, and generating citations. The Co-writer feature is like a Google Doc that lets you use a combination of these features in a document format. Quillbot is also a competitor to Grammarly with its browser extension allowing you to paraphrase, summarize, check grammar, etc. ## KnowledgeGPT For ChatGPT, the context is only as good as the prompt's size-limits and its pretrained data. Embeddings allow you to extend that pretrained data instead of adding the context to the prompt each time. [KnowledgeGPT](https://knowledgegpt.streamlit.app/) makes this easy by allowing you to upload documentation and by using your OpenAI API key, create those embeddings so questions can be asked about the document. It can also be self-hosted. ![[Screenshot 2023-03-29 at 11.03.19 AM.png]]