DEV Community: Alesia Chuma

The 5 Best AI Apps You Should Know in 2026

Alesia Chuma — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:12:34 +0000

AI apps have changed our lives, making many daily tasks easier and saving us valuable time. They assist with writing, analyze reports, plan meals or trips, offer financial advice, or provide health insights. There are hundreds of AI apps for various purposes, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed when trying to choose the right one. In this post, I’ll highlight the AI apps most worth your attention and why.

ChatOn: Best for daily tasks and content creation

There’s no denying the pace of our lives has accelerated in recent years. Technology helps solve many tasks faster, but the load of work and personal tasks has also increased. Sometimes, it feels like balancing work and personal life requires a full-time assistant. So, unless you're Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada with Andrea at your beck and call, I suggest "hiring" AI for the role.

One of the best AI personal assistants is ChatOn. The app can help you delegate daily tasks, from making shopping lists and meal plans to creating engaging social media posts and photos. ChatOn provides access to the most popular LLMs, letting you run the same tasks across multiple models and compare results (a golden rule among AI gurus).
ChatOn can analyze photos, PDFs, YouTube videos, and other content formats, making it an ideal AI assistant for both professional and personal use.

Grammarly: Best for writing and communication

Emails, reports, marketing materials, student essays – all of these need strong writing skills. If your writing is hard to follow or full of errors, you can’t build a good career or business relationships. Ideally, you would always produce high-quality writing, but a lack of time or the inability to focus can degrade your work and lead to negative consequences in your career or studies.

AI writing assistants like Grammarly help with this. The app allows you to produce clear, grammatically correct writing quickly. In addition, it offers features such as plagiarism and AI-generated content detection that can be useful if you need to write unique content.

Otter.ai: Best for transcribing audio

Work meetings can be exhausting, especially when they run back-to-back all day. You need to switch between topics while staying focused. Taking notes of colleagues’ speeches and agreements helps, but it isn’t easy. Colleagues can speak very fast, and whether you're typing or writing by hand, keeping up is hard, and handwritten notes can be illegible or lost entirely.
AI tools for transcription, like Otter.ai solve these problems perfectly. The app records Zoom and Google Meet conferences and uses artificial intelligence to automatically transcribe those recordings, breaking them down by speaker. The AI highlights the key conversation points in the recording, generates an overview, drafts emails, and answers your questions based on meeting content.

Cleo: Best for financial recommendations

Having a financial assistant who will analyze your spending and give recommendations on what can be optimized seems like a luxury. Traditionally, this service was accessible only to wealthy people who could hire financial professionals. But AI changes the game, giving everyone an opportunity to improve their financial literacy and make smarter financial decisions.

AI money coach Cleo talks with you in natural language about your finances and tracks your spending. The app highlights bad habits and helps you meet financial goals. With the app managing money, budgeting becomes less stressful.

FitnessAI: Best for personalized workouts at home and the gym

Health is the top priority for most of us, which is why regular workouts should be part of our weekly routine. In the field of fitness, AI can help build workouts, track progress, and prevent burnout. One of the best apps in the niche is FitnessAI, which builds a workout program based on recent performance, missed sessions, changes in strength output, and fatigue patterns over time. The app also allows workouts to adapt based on available equipment. Instead of abandoning the plan, it shifts with the circumstances.

Personalized workouts with FitnessAI are a good alternative to sessions with a personal trainer, an option that isn’t accessible to everyone due to cost or scheduling constraints.

Do you need all these AI apps or just a few? It depends on your preferences and tasks, but I highly recommend trying them and discovering how AI apps can help to make your life easier.

5 Apps to Boost Your Productivity While You Work From Home

Alesia Chuma — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:34:52 +0000

Working from home has many perks, but staying productive and managing tasks that require office supplies can be tricky. If you need to work with paper documents like agreements or invoices, you know how important it is to scan them with high quality or quickly read documents with many pages. As a remote work lover, I can share my favorite tools for home office productivity. Some of them I’ve used for more than 5 years; others I’ve discovered recently, but they save me from having to go into the office.

iScanner

When I started working from home, I suddenly realized I needed a scanner. Every week, agreements with contractors, invoices, and other documents needed to be signed and sent off. In the office, it was an easy task that took a few minutes, but working from home without a scanner made that difficult. I’d have to find the nearest print center and have it scanned or printed just for one signature. It was a nightmare.

Fortunately, mobile apps for scanning and editing documents saved the day. My favorite is iScanner, which lets me get high-quality scans of documents, sign them on my phone, fill forms, and use AI features to polish them up. Dewarping and edge repair help make my scanned documents look better than their physical copies.

ChatOn

When AI can become a personal assistant, it would be a miss not to use it for work. I love the AI built into various services like Gmail or Grammarly for writing and editing texts and emails. So I decided to take it a little bit further and incorporate an AI chatbot into my workflow to boost my productivity, delegating tasks like analyzing web pages and PDF files. After a brief comparison, I chose ChatOn because it's cheaper than ChatGPT and offers multiple LLMs. For tasks related to research or competitor analysis, Perplexity Sonar can be more effective than ChatGPT, and Claude Sonnet can deliver better results when working with PDFs.

When I do research for my work, I sort through a lot of internet resources and PDFs. It’s time-consuming work and needs maximum focus. ChatOn offers special features like webpage analysis and PDF summaries that save me time and help me find even more insights.

Trello

Working from home has allowed me to take on more than one client, which means I need to plan my time juggling various projects, and sometimes it can be difficult. One client prefers to track tasks and time in Jira, another prefers Google Calendar, but in general, I have to manage all tasks in a single personal board to stay productive.

I’ve been using Trello as a task manager, and I love it. When I move cards with tasks between columns, I get the satisfaction of ticking a box. Trello helps me visualize my workload and focus on the most important tasks first. I actively use features like labeling and reminders to help me keep that focus.

And one big plus is that I can use Trello boards not only for work tasks, but also to create boards for shopping or planning holiday trips.

Miro

One of the big downsides of working from home is the lack of an offline meeting space for brainstorming. It's so cool sit with my coworkers in one room, freely communicating and capturing ideas, even the craziest, on a flipchart. At the end of the meeting, you can see the fruits of your creative labor on the board.
Remote work has changed this process. Miro online boards can be a successful substitute for a flipchart. You can brainstorm and work on ideas on an endless online board. It may even prove to be more convenient than working with a real flipchart, where your notes are limited by the size of the page. Also, an online board helps save time when you replace or analyze notes. And obviously, it’s a better approach for saving and sharing brainstorming results.

Zomni

Being productive can feel impossible when you have low energy. It’s a known fact that healthy nutrition, good sleep, and exercise help us to feel our best and do our best work. For me, the most difficult of these is getting good sleep, because after sitting in front of a screen all day, I have trouble winding down to fall asleep. I’ve been working on it, and I’ve started following recommendations from the Zomni app. The app has improved my sleep step by step, from avoiding bad habits to doing breathing exercises before bed. I saw a huge improvement in my sleep quality in just six weeks.

This was my list of the best apps to boost productivity while working from home. They helped with the challenges at the beginning of my work-from-home period. Lack of office appliances or offline meetings isn’t a problem now, and I can enjoy the benefits of remote work without the hassle.