Essential apps for small businesses: Trello, Slack, QuickBooks, Glyph. Boost productivity and scale operations.
In today's digital world, business apps are essential for any small business looking to maximize productivity and efficiency. With so many tools and solutions available, it can be overwhelming to determine which apps are truly vital for managing key operations and processes.
The right business apps allow small business owners and teams to collaborate seamlessly, market more effectively, track progress and data, automate tedious tasks, and more. While the specific must-have apps will vary for each business, there are a number of universal favorites loved by small business owners across industries.
To discover the top apps that small businesses simply can't live without, we surveyed over 100 small business owners and startup founders. Read on for the top essential apps that are helping today's small businesses thrive and scale.
Slack makes team communication easy and organized with its channels, direct messaging, and threaded conversations. Everything is centralized in one place, providing transparency and access to the whole team.
Slack integrates seamlessly with many other popular apps through its expansive API and app directory. You can set up integrations to bring notifications, data, and workflows from tools like Google Drive, Trello, GitHub, and more directly into Slack channels and conversations. This creates an efficient hub for collaborating across apps.
The platform also goes beyond text conversations with built-in audio and video calling. Have quick verbal chats via an audio huddle or video call, share screens, and record meetings, all within Slack without any external tools needed.
With powerful search, customizable notifications, and options for teams of all sizes, it's no wonder Slack has become the top choice for streamlining team communication and collaboration. The app provides numerous advantages over email alone for improved productivity and engagement.
Zoom has become an essential video conferencing tool for small businesses. With its easy-to-use interface, Zoom makes online meetings more engaging and interactive.
Zoom offers features like screen sharing and recording that make online collaboration seamless. You can share your screen to walk through presentations, documents or projects in real time. Zoom's recording feature also lets you record your meetings to share later with anyone who couldn't attend live.
For small businesses, Zoom also provides robust security features like waiting rooms, passwords and host controls. You can rest assured your online meetings are safe and secure. With end-to-end encryption, your conversations stay private.
Zoom's reliability and video quality help small businesses stay connected even when working remotely. Its features optimize online meetings, webinars, and video calls for productivity and engagement. Zoom has become an essential business communications tool.
Asana has become a popular project management app for small businesses and teams. It provides tools to organize projects and tasks, track progress, and collaborate with others.
Some key features that make Asana valuable for business users include:
With its simple interface, robust feature set, and flexible pricing, Asana has become a leading choice for small business teams looking to improve organization and productivity when managing projects. The ability to view real-time progress and workload, collaborate across departments, and integrate with other apps makes it a versatile platform. Asana helps streamline processes from start to finish.
QuickBooks is one of the most popular accounting software solutions for small businesses. It handles key accounting tasks like invoicing, expense tracking, payroll, and reporting.
QuickBooks makes the accounting and bookkeeping process efficient by centralizing everything in one cloud-based platform. Owners and accountants can access financial data anytime from their computer or mobile device.
Some of the key features of QuickBooks include:
QuickBooks integrates with ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Square for seamless POS transactions and inventory syncing. It also connects to numerous banks so transactions can be directly imported into the accounting system.
Overall, QuickBooks takes a complex small business process like accounting and makes it simple. The automation features save time, while powerful reporting provides financial insights.
Calendly is an invaluable scheduling and appointment booking tool for small businesses and teams. It makes the process of coordinating meetings and appointments incredibly smooth and efficient.
One of the biggest benefits of Calendly is that it fully integrates with your calendar system, whether that's Google Calendar, Office 365, or iCal. This allows you to keep a unified schedule and automatically see availability and any conflicts across your calendar.
Calendly also lets you set buffer times between meetings and customize the length of meeting invites. This helps avoid double booking and allows transition time between back-to-back meetings.
For teams, Calendly offers useful collaboration features like team availability. This allows you to see when your coworkers are free and makes internal scheduling easy.
With customizable booking pages and email reminders, Calendly takes the friction out of scheduling and helps small businesses professionally manage appointments. It's an essential tool for productivity and coordination.
HubSpot offers an all-in-one CRM platform to help businesses manage the entire customer relationship from lead to close. By centralizing all customer data in one place, HubSpot provides visibility across sales, marketing, and support teams to foster better collaboration.
Key features include:
With an end-to-end platform, HubSpot aims to provide cohesion across sales, marketing, and support. The centralized database and automation helps teams work together more efficiently to drive revenue.
Glyph is an AI meeting assistant that is revolutionizing how teams collaborate. This innovative software integrates directly into your existing meeting tools like Zoom, Webex, or Google Meet. Glyph then records your meetings and automatically generates notes, action items, decisions, and transcripts.
One of the key benefits of Glyph is that it ensures important information from meetings doesn't get lost or forgotten. With Glyph, you have an automated record of everything discussed and decided on. It tracks all tasks, decisions, notes, and follow-ups in one centralized place, so nothing falls through the cracks after the meeting ends.
Glyph also makes meetings more efficient and productive by automatically highlighting action items and decisions. This makes it easy to know exactly what needs to be done after each meeting. Glyph even allows you to search through past meetings to find information quickly.
For busy managers and teams, Glyph is a game changer. It frees up time spent taking manual notes, deciphering messy notes, or trying to recall past conversations. Instead, Glyph gives you meeting summaries instantly after each meeting ends. This allows teams to implement decisions faster and not waste time rehashing previous discussions.
Overall, Glyph's AI meeting assistant technology is transforming workflow collaboration. With its automated note-taking and task tracking features, Glyph ensures meetings drive real results for your business. It's an essential tool for any team that wants to work smarter, move faster, and collaborate more effectively.
Canva is an intuitive graphic design platform that makes it easy for non-designers to create stunning graphics and presentations. With Canva, you can choose from hundreds of professionally designed templates for social media posts, slide decks, flyers, posters, and more.
Canva's simple drag-and-drop interface allows anyone to quickly customize templates by adding images, text, and graphics. There's no need to have an advanced degree in graphic design. Canva has done all the heavy visual design lifting for you with their templates. All you need to do is personalize and edit the template to suit your needs.
For small businesses and startups with limited design resources, Canva is an invaluable tool. You can create polished graphics and visual assets that reinforce your brand identity and style. Whether you need to make an infographic, produce marketing materials, or design a company presentation, Canva provides a fast and easy way to do it yourself.
The top apps used by small businesses can make a huge difference in productivity and growth. As we've seen, tools like Slack, Zoom, Asana, QuickBooks, Calendly, HubSpot, Glyph, and Canva are essential for handling key business functions from communication to accounting to design.
Choosing the right technology stack is crucial for any small business to operate efficiently and scale effectively. The apps listed in this article are great options that are affordable, user-friendly, and integrate well together. Focus on selecting tools that align with your business needs and workflows.
We'd love to hear what your favorite apps are as a small business owner or employee! What are the top 5 tools you couldn't live without? Let us know in the comments below. We look forward to learning about the technology stacks that have worked best for your small business.
Otter.ai has become a popular automated transcription service that uses advanced speech recognition technology to transcribe voice conversations into text quickly and accurately. The service gained traction with students, researchers, journalists, and business professionals who need to convert audio content into text for easier reading, sharing and analysis.
Otter utilizes artificial intelligence to generate transcripts with 85%+ accuracy in real time. Some key features include the ability to import, record and share conversations from meetings, interviews, lectures, podcasts and other audio sources. Otter is free for limited use, with paid plans starting at $8 per month for more features and minutes.
While Otter is a top choice, there are many transcription services as alternatives that offer a combination of speed, accuracy and affordability. The transcription space has seen innovation in machine learning to automate the process, while still utilizing some human editing to ensure high quality. This article will highlight some of the best alternatives to Otter for personal and business use cases.
Trint is an AI-powered transcription service that automatically transcribes audio and video files with high accuracy. Some key features of Trint include:
Some key pros of Trint are the real-time transcription capabilities, collaborative editing features, and automated speaker diarization. Downsides are that it can be less accurate with heavy accents compared to human transcription, and the lack of punctuation in transcripts. But Trint's speed and smart features like custom vocabulary make it one of the top choices for automated transcription.
Sonix is an AI-powered automatic transcription service that converts audio and video files into text. Some of the key features of Sonix include:
Some of the pros of using Sonix include high accuracy, fast turnaround, security, and language support. The cons are that it lacks some advanced features of more expensive tools like in-line editing, team collaboration, and time-coded transcripts. But for basic transcription needs, Sonix is an affordable and accurate option.
Glyph is an audio to text transcription service that utilizes advanced speech recognition technology to provide fast and accurate transcriptions. Some of the key features of Temi include:
Some of the pros of using Glyph AI is fast turnaround times, easy-to-use interface, co-pilot to content repurposing and integrations with major platforms. The cons are that transcription accuracy may vary, and it lacks some advanced features available in other solutions like task management and team collaboration capabilities. But overall it remains one of the top choices for basic automated transcription needs.
Simon Says is an AI-powered transcription service that offers fast and accurate automated transcripts.
Some key features of Simon Says include:
Some pros of using Simon Says:
Potential downsides:
Overall, Simon Says provides a solid automated transcription solution for common use cases. It's easy to use and affordable, making it a viable option for individuals and teams that need frequent transcripts. Lack of human editing may be an issue for some complex transcription needs.
Descript is an AI-powered transcription tool that allows users to upload audio or video files and receive automated transcriptions.
Some of the key features of Descript include:
Some pros of using Descript are the fast turnaround time, integrations with media platforms, and easy-to-use editing tools. The transcripts are generally accurate for clear audio.
Potential downsides are that accuracy decreases for poor quality audio or audio with background noise. The automated speech recognition may not understand thick accents or highly technical vocabulary. There is no human review of transcripts to check accuracy.
Overall, Descript is a top choice for those needing quick automated transcripts of clear audio/video files. It's easy to use and integrates well with common media tools. Those needing perfect transcripts or transcriptions of complex audio may need to look at more advanced solutions.
Rev is an automated transcription service that uses AI and human transcriptionists to convert audio to text. Some key features of Rev include:
Some pros of using Rev are the fast turnaround time and highly accurate transcripts. The ability to get captions is also useful.
Potential downsides are the cost, which can be higher than some competing services. The mobile app also has mixed reviews in terms of ease of use. But overall, Rev is a top choice for those needing accurate transcripts and captions quickly.
Scribie is an automated transcription service that can convert audio or video files to text. Some key features of Scribie include:
Some pros of using Scribie are fast turnaround times, advanced speech recognition, affordable pricing, and integrations with popular platforms. The transcripts aren't always 100% accurate so you may need to invest in extras like human verification, but overall Scribie provides a convenient automated transcription solution.
Some downsides are that accuracy can vary for noisy audio or thick accents. The editor tool for transcript review could also be more robust. Scribie lacks some custom features available from competitors like team accounts, time-stamping, and searchability. But for basic transcription needs, Scribie is an efficient and budget-friendly option.
GoTranscript is an automated transcription service that uses AI and human transcriptionists to convert audio and video files into text.
Some of the key features of GoTranscript include:
Some potential pros of using GoTranscript are its reasonable base pricing starting at $0.90 per audio minute, ability to get fast and accurate transcripts, and the self-serve account dashboard.
Potential cons are that it may lack more advanced features like speaker identification, team accounts, analytics, or integrations offered by some competitors. The verbatim transcription option also costs considerably more.
So in summary, GoTranscript provides a solid basic transcription service for converting audio and video to text quickly and securely. It may appeal more to individual or occasional business users rather than larger teams or enterprises. But it's still a top choice to consider for speech-to-text needs if you want fast turnaround at a competitive price.
Speechpad is an automated transcription service that uses AI to transcribe audio and video files. Some key features of Speechpad include:
Some pros of using Speechpad are the fast and accurate transcriptions, collaboration features, and integrations with popular apps. The AI training also helps improve results for industry-specific vocabulary.
Potential downsides are the lack of foreign language support and possibly less accurate transcriptions for poor audio quality recordings. There are also limits on the free plan, with higher pricing for extra features and volume.
Overall, Speechpad is a top choice for automated transcription thanks to the AI-powered accuracy, speed, and integrations. It works well for short, clear audio recordings in English.
Verbit is an AI-powered transcription service that provides fast, accurate automated transcripts. Some of the key features of Verbit include:
The main downside of Verbit is the higher pricing compared to some automated services starting at $0.10 per minute. However, users are paying for maximum accuracy, security, and features. For those handling sensitive data or seeking verbatim meeting transcripts, Verbit is a top choice.
Productivity is essential for success in the workplace. With increasing workloads and constant demands on our time, finding ways to work smarter and maximize output is key. This is where AI writing tools come in.
AI writing tools utilize advanced natural language processing to generate human-like content. While concerns exist about the appropriate use of these tools, they offer exciting productivity benefits when applied thoughtfully. In the right context, AI writing assistants can help knowledge workers save time, increase capabilities, speed research, improve consistency, spark creativity, reduce fatigue, enable collaboration, and automate formatting.
By delegating rote writing tasks to an AI assistant, you free up mental bandwidth to focus on high-value responsibilities. Combining AI writing with human oversight, revision, and subject matter expertise allows for efficient, high-quality output. This guide will explore the top ways AI writing tools can boost productivity at work. Discover how implementing responsible AI automation can help you work faster and smarter.
One of the biggest ways AI writing assistants can improve productivity is by saving time spent writing. These tools can generate content much faster than typing everything manually. For basic content creation like drafts, summaries, and outlines, AI writers can compose high-quality text in just seconds or minutes.
This enables you to drastically reduce the time you spend on writing tasks. Rather than painstakingly typing and editing paragraphs yourself, you can offload the initial drafting to an AI assistant. This frees up significant time and mental energy for your other responsibilities and priorities.
With an AI writer handling basic content generation, you can focus your efforts on higher-value tasks that require human intelligence, judgment and creativity. This makes you much more productive overall. Instead of getting bogged down with content creation, you have the space to strategize, ideate and manage higher-level work.
AI writing tools lead to huge time savings compared to manual writing. This enables you to get more done each day, which drives significant gains in productivity over the long run. The speed and efficiency of automated content generation is a game changer for anyone who regularly creates written material.
AI writing assistants can help you expand your capabilities and take on more writing than would be humanly possible alone. With an AI tool, you can increase your writing output and handle a larger volume of work.
For example, AI writing assistants allow you to:
Overall, AI writing assistants expand your capabilities by enabling you to write faster, take on more work, scale up when needed, and coordinate content creation. This allows you to go beyond human limitations.
AI writing assistants can greatly accelerate research and information gathering, enabling you to create content faster. Rather than spending hours searching the web and reading through multiple sources, an AI tool can digest and synthesize large amounts of information for you.
For example, you can provide an AI assistant with some keywords or a research question, and it can go out and analyze hundreds of sources to pull out the most relevant facts, statistics, and insights. The AI will read through the source material for you and identify key pieces of information to include in your content.
This automates a very tedious part of the research process. Rather than combing through search results and sources manually, the AI does the heavy lifting for you. This allows you to focus your efforts on thinking critically about the research and crafting your narrative, rather than getting bogged down in the search process.
By streamlining research, AI writing assistants enable you to accelerate your content creation workflow. The time savings really add up when you're researching and writing long-form, information-rich content. What used to take hours or days of work can now be accomplished much faster with the help of AI.
So if you want to boost your productivity, let an AI writing assistant take care of the busywork of research for you. The AI can rapidly gather and analyze information from the web and deliver you just the most useful facts and insights to incorporate into your content. This will speed up your process substantially.
One of the major benefits of AI writing assistants is their ability to help improve consistency in your content. Here are some of the key ways they can help:
AI tools can analyze your past writing and learn your brand's tone of voice. They can then generate content that aligns with your desired style. This ensures consistency across all content assets, even when produced by multiple authors. You spend less time providing tone, voice and style guidance.
The consistency provided by AI tools means your team can increase content volume without sacrificing quality. More content strengthens your brand identity and helps drive business goals. AI makes it scalable.
Generating similar content types often involves repetitious work like formatting, boilerplate language, and standard text. AI tools automate these mundane tasks so you can focus on providing unique value. This also reduces human error from fatigue.
In summary, AI writing assistants help ensure consistency by maintaining your brand voice, enabling increased output, and automating repetitive work. This improves overall content quality and allows your team to focus on providing impactful information.
AI writing tools can help unlock new levels of creativity in your work. By automating some of the mechanical aspects of writing, these tools free up mental energy to focus on big picture creative thinking.
Rather than getting bogged down in sentence-level construction, you can dedicate more time to high-value tasks like brainstorming ideas, developing storylines, and imagining creative directions to take your writing. The AI handles the busywork of translating your vision into polished text.
In addition, AI tools can provide unique sources of inspiration and ideation. Their ability to generate millions of language combinations on demand allows you to effortlessly explore a wide range of narrative possibilities. You can use the AI to create rough drafts to stimulate your own thinking and unearth creative connections you may not have considered.
By rapidly iterating through variations of tone, structure, and vocabulary, AI tools empower you to push the boundaries of your creativity. They make it simple to experiment with unconventional approaches without fear of wasted effort. This gives you the freedom to think originally and try inventive techniques that human writers may self-censor.
Ultimately, AI writing assistants enhance creativity by allowing you to operate at a higher level. Rather than focusing on word choice and syntax, you can dedicate your energy to imagination, insight, and breaking creative ground. The technology handles the tedious implementation work, freeing you up for the parts that really require human ingenuity.
Writing can be mentally demanding and lead to fatigue over time. Staring at a blank page trying to come up with ideas is draining. The constant need to be creative and articulate can wear people down.
AI writing assistants help reduce writing fatigue in a few key ways:
In summary, AI writing tools lighten the mental burden of writing and recharge writers' creative energy. By reducing fatigue, they support greater productivity and idea generation over the long run.
AI writing assistants allow teams to collaborate on content creation in new ways. With the ability for multiple people to contribute ideas and drafts, AI can help democratize content creation across an organization.
Rather than relying solely on a single writer, AI tools allow you to crowdsource ideas from your team. Everyone can submit bullet points, outlines, or rough draft text to the AI. The AI then synthesizes these contributions into an organized, coherent draft.
This collaborative approach brings several advantages:
With an AI assistant handling the busy work of drafting and editing, collaboration becomes much simpler. Rather than getting wordsmithing feedback, you can focus reviewer feedback on high-level direction and subject matter accuracy.
The end result is content that is enriched by your team's shared knowledge. AI collaboration tools help you increase team productivity, draw on diverse expertise, and create content no one person could produce alone.
One of the biggest time sinks in content creation is formatting - inserting images, charts and graphics, formatting citations and references, and creating presentation decks. AI writing assistants can help automate much of this repetitive and tedious formatting work.
AI tools like Anthropic can generate original images, charts, and graphics to visually represent data and concepts discussed in your writing. This saves the time of having to manually create or source visuals. The AI can create infographics, diagrams, flowcharts, and more on demand to illustrate your points.
Referencing sources properly using the right citation style takes time. AI writing assistants can instantly format citations and generate bibliographies in any major style like APA, MLA, or Chicago. Just feed the tool the source information and it will handle citing it correctly within your document, as well as produce a properly formatted references section.
Producing slide decks to accompany written reports or articles can be tedious and time consuming. AI tools can auto-generate clean, professional slides based on the key points in your writing. This allows you to quickly create polished presentations without having to build slides from scratch. The AI can even suggest design templates and color schemes optimized for your content.
By automating formatting tasks like these, AI writing assistants boost your productivity by enabling you to focus on producing great content without getting bogged down in repetitive formatting work. The AI handles the busywork while you focus on being creative.
The use of AI writing assistants can provide a variety of benefits for improving productivity at work. By automating repetitive writing tasks, they save time and reduce fatigue. AI tools expand capabilities by generating content from prompts, enabling faster research and writing. They also improve consistency of documents and messaging.
AI writing assistants further boost creativity by providing starting points to build upon and sparking new ideas. Features like autocomplete and rewriting help create higher quality content faster. The future of AI productivity tools is bright, with continued improvements in accuracy and capabilities on the horizon.
For any writer or creator, AI assistants are versatile tools to incorporate into your workflow. With the right approach, they can save hours of work and unlock new levels of productivity. The key is finding the right balance in how you integrate them into your unique creative process. Approach with thoughtfulness to maximize the upsides and minimize any potential downsides.
After reading this guide, you now have a solid understanding of how AI writing tools can aid productivity. From time savings to enhanced creativity, their benefits are impressive and will likely continue to grow. While AI cannot fully replace human writing and ingenuity, it can certainly amplify it to new heights. With the productivity superpowers AI provides, you are now equipped to accomplish more in less time - and create content that truly stands out.
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