Every list of free AI tools is written by someone who has not used them past the demo. This one is shorter and more sceptical, and it is organised by what the tool is actually good at rather than by what it claims.
Genuinely useful: first drafts you will rewrite
The reliable win is getting from a blank page to a bad draft, fast. A bad draft is enormously easier to improve than nothing, and the quality of the generated text matters much less than people expect, because you are going to rewrite it anyway.
Useful with supervision: transcription and summary
Transcription is close to solved. Summary is not — it is confidently wrong in ways that are hard to spot precisely because the output reads well. Use it to find where in a two-hour recording something was said, not to learn what was said.
Impressive, rarely useful: one-click everything
If the demo takes ten seconds and your version takes an hour, the difference is the part the demo skipped.
Where free stops
Free tiers are generous for evaluation and almost never for production. The two that reliably bite are rate limits during a deadline and, more importantly, the terms about what may be done with what you upload. Read that clause before your unreleased work is the thing you are testing with.
