The 12 Best (Free) AI Tools For Students

If you’re a student in 2024, you should be using AI (and no, I don’t mean asking ChatGPT to write your essays). There’s a whole world of AI tools built to help you study better, conduct great research, manage your schedule, and more. And the best part? Many of them are completely free to use. Here are 12 of the best free AI tools for students—and how to use them.

If you’re lost in class…try using Otter. Take an audio recording of class, and Otter will transcribe it, take notes, and summarize what went down. If you’re taking a virtual class, Otter automatically adds visuals from lecture slides to the notes, too. Once you’re ready to study, Otter can answer questions about anything mentioned in class.

If you’re an auditory learner…talk it out with the Pi app. You can speak out loud to this chatbot, and it will answer you in a voice of your choosing. Plus, Pi has the ability to search the web—so you can get answers about real-time events or new research.

If you’re struggling with time management…tell kAI your to-do list, and it will automatically organize your day into time blocks for you.

If you’re writing an essay…try out MyMind. Save all of your sources (even images and videos) to MyMind, and it organizes your content so you can easily find what you need. It even puts together a “TL;DR” for each piece of content, so you can quickly recall the main points of that random article you saved—without having to reread it.

If you’re working on creative writing…TextFX is a great helper. This tool, made with musician Lupe Fiasco, helps you come up with creative ideas, build scenes, generate literary devices, and more.

If you’re conducting research…ask SciSpace any research question, and it’ll pull insights from the top five research papers about the topic. You can also upload a paper (via URL or PDF) and highlight confusing text, math, and tables to get simple explanations. Ask follow-up questions and get instant answers.

Or, ask Elicit a research question to get a list of relevant sources from a database of 200 million papers. You can then extract details from papers into an organized table.

If you’re lost in Excel sheets…explain what you’re trying to do, and Formulizer will instantly convert your ideas into formulas you can use in Excel, Sheets, or Notion.

If you’re studying for an exam…send an image of your studying material to Google’s Socratic app. It analyzes any equation, shows you the answer, and breaks down the step-by-step method it used to solve it with visual explanations.

If you want to make studying more fun…try Any Summary. This tool takes any file (audio, video, image, CSV, and more) and summarizes it in a ton of different ways. You can turn your studying material into a bullet point summary, a Tweet, or even a song.

If you need an extension…the AI writer app drafts emails for you. Simply prompt it to write an email to your professor asking for a few more days on that tricky assignment—you can even turn on the “persuasive” setting to really seal the deal.

If you’re working on a group project…check out the browser extension Glasp. Simply highlight text on any webpage or PDF, and Glasp will save it, summarize it, and organize it with tags. You can then share your collected content with other group members, leave comments and notes for context, and save their contributions.

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Matt Wolfe (FutureTools.io)