Course reference

AI Tool Radar

Every fact that goes stale lives on this page, and nowhere else in the course.

Last verified: 13 September 2026. Model names, prices and rankings change every few months. The lessons teach you how to choose; this page tracks what is currently worth choosing. If the date above is more than a quarter old, trust the live sources at the bottom over the names here.

General assistant

Your default for writing, thinking, summarising and everyday questions.

What decides it: Prose quality, how well it follows instructions, and whether it admits uncertainty instead of inventing.

  • ChatGPT
  • Claude
  • Gemini

Long documents

A contract, a thesis, a year of meeting notes — anything you cannot paste in pieces.

What decides it: Context window size, and whether it quotes the source rather than paraphrasing it.

  • Gemini
  • Claude
  • NotebookLM

Research with sources

The answer depends on something recent, and you need to check where it came from.

What decides it: Live web access and real, clickable citations you can verify.

  • Perplexity
  • ChatGPT with search
  • Gemini

Writing in your voice

Anything going out under your name.

What decides it: How well it holds a voice profile across a long piece without drifting to house style.

  • Claude
  • ChatGPT

Spreadsheets and calculation

Numbers matter and a wrong one is expensive.

What decides it: Whether it EXECUTES code rather than predicting the answer. Always ask to see the working.

  • ChatGPT (data analysis)
  • Claude (analysis tool)
  • Gemini in Sheets

Images

Illustration, mockups, thumbnails, concept art.

What decides it: Prompt control, text rendering inside images, and licensing terms for commercial use.

  • Midjourney
  • Google Imagen
  • Ideogram
  • Adobe Firefly

Voice

Narration, dubbing, cloning your own voice for scale.

What decides it: Naturalness, language coverage, and consent controls around cloning.

  • ElevenLabs
  • Descript

Video

Short clips, talking-head presenters, B-roll.

What decides it: Clip length, shot consistency, and whether the output survives being watched twice.

  • Runway
  • Google Veo
  • HeyGen (avatars)
  • Kling

Automation

A repeated sequence across apps that should run without you.

What decides it: App coverage, pricing model (per task vs per operation), and whether you can self-host if privacy demands it.

  • Make.com
  • Zapier
  • n8n

Agents

Multi-step work where the AI decides the next step, not you.

What decides it: Tool-calling reliability, memory across runs, and MCP support for connecting your systems.

  • n8n AI Agent
  • Zapier Agents
  • Make + MCP
  • Claude / ChatGPT agent modes

Running locally

The data genuinely cannot leave your machine.

What decides it: What your hardware can run, and how much capability you are willing to trade for privacy.

  • Ollama
  • LM Studio

Check these, not this page

A written list is out of date the week it is published. These are updated continuously — use them before any decision that costs money.

The part that does not change

Tools churn; the questions do not. Whatever is winning this quarter, you still choose by asking: does it need current information, how long is the input, does a human read the output as mine, does a wrong number cost me, and can this data leave my machine? Those five questions have survived every model release so far.

The decision tree