30+ Best AI Apps of 2026 We Tested and Loved

OpenAI's ChatGPT has become a household name, known for its ability to generate human-like text on a vast range of topics. It is your ultimate creative partner, a tool that can effortlessly switch between being a meticulous copy editor, a boundless source of ideas, a therapist (that can feel robotic), a helpful coding assistant, and basically anything you want it to.

I've been using ChatGPT with my content team for the past year, and it has fundamentally changed our workflow. We initially approached it as a tool for generating first drafts, but its capabilities quickly proved to be much broader. We now use it for everything from creating social media calendars to outlining long-form articles and even generating video scripts.

The ability to fine-tune its responses by providing specific instructions and examples has been a game-changer for maintaining our brand voice across different platforms. ChatGPT helped us through a particularly challenging project that required us to create a series of technical blog posts on a tight deadline.

Our subject matter expert provided the core information, and we used ChatGPT to expand on these points, simplify complex jargon, and ensure a consistent and engaging tone. This is one of the best free AI apps for iPhone and Android for its ability to quickly process our expert's notes and turn them into well-structured drafts that save us countless hours. ChatGPT did not replace our writers but augmented their skills and freed them up to focus on more strategic and creative aspects of content creation.

Gemini's ability to see, hear, and understand the world in a more holistic way sets it apart from the top free AI apps. For marketers and researchers, this means unlocking deeper insights from diverse datasets and creating more compelling, data-driven campaigns.

We have been using Gemini for a few months now, and the impact has been great! We leverage Gemini's multimodal capabilities for one of the tasks that demanded intense market research. Instead of just analyzing text-based reports, we fed it images of competitor products, video ads, and audio from customer feedback calls. The insights it generated were incredible!

It could identify visual trends in competitor branding that we had missed and pinpoint specific emotional cues in customer-facing audio that helped us refine our messaging. Gemini can also be a great aid for launching successful marketing campaigns.

This is one of the top AI applications that can be used to create a presentation that seamlessly integrates market data, visual mockups of our ads, and even a draft script for promotional videos. The ability to work with all these different content types within a single platform has made our collaborative process much more efficient and our final output more cohesive and impactful.

Claude is one of the best AI apps that you can fully trust. Its "constitutional AI" framework ensures that its responses are not only accurate but also ethically sound. This makes it the perfect tool for professionals in fields like law, finance, and academia who require a high degree of precision and reliability.

Claude is different (in a good way, of course) than most top AI apps. Its focus on safety and transparency won us over. Our first experiment was to hand over the wilderness of our research—the dense thicket of articles, studies, and sourcebooks that often threaten to stall a project before it truly begins. The task of hacking through this undergrowth, which once consumed days, was accomplished with an astonishing elegance.

Beyond content research and structure, it has become our trusted whetstone for language. When a paragraph feels dull or a sentence refuses to land, we can bring it to Claude. Together, we can chisel the prose, refine its clarity, and adjust its tone until the language is as sharp and effective as it needs to be.

And the best part of this AI app? It will not diminish the soul of your work! The spark of inspiration, the final choice of words, the heart of the story— remains profoundly human. This is the best AI app with free and paid versions. It has earned its place not as a mere tool, but as an integral and respected member of our creative process.

If you're tired of the sanitized and overly cautious responses of other AIs, Grok is a breath of fresh air. Its direct pipeline to the pulse of the internet, combined with its irreverent personality, makes for a more engaging and entertaining user experience.

As writers, being real and up-to-date in our work is the most important thing. We were so excited about Grok and could not wait to access its direct line (through X) to what’s happening right now. It’s been a great tool for understanding the present moment. If you're writing a story set today, Grok helps you see what people are actually talking about and feeling.

This best free AI app for Android and iOS cuts through all the online noise and shows you the main ideas and opinions that are starting to spread. It is also really useful for the creative part of writing. Its sarcastic and blunt personality took a moment to get used to, but it's perfect for creating characters.

The other day, I was using this tool to write a success story for a popular game development company and decided to use Grok for the research. This AI not only helped me with all the relevant information about the company, but also helped me understand the real perspectives of the public. With all this information, I was able to draft a content piece that not only read well but was also packed with relevant facts and information. Grok’s real-time, honest perspective is a super valuable addition to my writer's toolkit.

For users, specifically for developers, DeepSeek is like having an experienced pair programmer available 24/7. Its deep understanding of code allows it to not just generate snippets but also to understand the context of your project, suggest optimizations, and help you untangle complex bugs.

DeepSeek functions as a creative partner, and can fundamentally streamline your workflow. Recently, I was wrestling with a brand narrative that just wasn't landing. After struggling to pinpoint the issue, I fed our entire content strategy—from blog posts to ad copy—into DeepSeek. The analysis was stunning!

It identified a critical inconsistency in our brand voice that emerged three months prior and suggested a way to "refactor" our core messaging, not just fixing the problem but making the entire narrative stronger and more compelling. This tool has become my go-to for ensuring narrative integrity across all platforms.

I also use it to translate a dense, long-form story into a series of crisp, engaging social media posts, ensuring the voice remains authentic. Along with creative writing, DeepSeek also functions as an advanced analytics tool that can sharpen both your creative instincts and strategic decisions.

If you're looking for a top-tier text-to-speech solution that sounds genuinely human, AI Voice is a fantastic choice. The sheer quality of the voices is what sets it apart—they don't sound robotic or artificial.

AI Voice is a revolutionary text-to-speech application that transforms any written text into incredibly natural-sounding audio. Powered by advanced artificial intelligence, this tool is designed for professionals, students, and content creators who demand high-quality, human-like voiceovers without the robotic tone of traditional speech synthesis.

Whether you are producing videos, creating podcasts, developing audiobooks, or enhancing business presentations, AI Voice provides the studio-level narration you need. The app offers a rich selection of voices across multiple languages and accents, giving you a global reach.

You can fine-tune your audio to perfection by customizing the pitch, speed, and tone, ensuring your message is delivered with the precise emotion and emphasis it deserves. AI Voice makes professional-grade voiceover creation accessible to everyone, offering a powerful, free, and unlimited platform for all your text-to-speech needs.

Voice.AI is your ticket to a world of vocal transformation. Imagine hopping into a gaming session and surprising your friends with a perfect impression of a famous celebrity, or narrating your next video in a completely different voice.

Voice.AI, the ultimate AI-powered voice changer and cloning application. Designed for everyone from professional content creators seeking a unique edge to individuals just looking to have fun with friends, this AI app offers a universe of auditory possibilities. At its core, the app utilizes advanced VoiceGecko technology, allowing you to effortlessly clone your own voice or change it into something entirely new in real-time.

The true power of Voice.ai lies in its incredible features and vast library of options. You can dive into the ‘Voice Universe,’ a massive and ever-growing collection of user-generated voices, ensuring you'll always find the perfect sound for any occasion.

The advanced voice cloning is remarkably accurate, giving you the power to elevate your videos and podcasts with unique and engaging audio. Despite this sophisticated technology, the experience is made simple with an intuitive ‘tap and speak’ interface, making it accessible to everyone.

Voice.ai is free to download, allowing you to immediately explore its core capabilities, with powerful upgrades available through different upgrades starting at $4.99 for those who want to unlock its full potential.

RunwayML is a creative playground for anyone interested in the future of video. It's not just an addition to the best AI video generators; it's a suite of powerful tools that can do everything!

RunwayML is a mobile app that serves as an AI video generation tool, allowing users to create images and videos in any style they can imagine. Its peculiar feature is the integration of its advanced generative AI model, Gen-4, and a "Chat Mode" that allows users to create content from a single conversational interface.

The app enables users to maintain consistent characters, objects, and locations across their creations. Additionally, it offers seamless integration with its desktop version, allowing users to easily transfer assets between their phone and computer.

With this tool, you can start with an image and endlessly expand it outward, creating these incredible, mind-bending visuals for social media apps. It feels less like a tool and more like a futuristic sandbox where our creative team gets to build impossible things.

Filmora strikes the perfect balance between ease of use and powerful features. If you're new to video editing, you'll love the intuitive drag-and-drop interface and the helpful AI tools that automate tedious tasks.

Filmora is an AI-based video editor and movie maker that offers a wide range of features for both beginners and professionals. Its peculiar features include an AI Auto Cut for creating highlight reels and AI video effects like Infinite Zoom and AI Show.

The app also has tools for generating videos and voiceovers from text and a smart cutout feature to remove unwanted elements.For more advanced editing, it provides keyframes, a Chromakey for green screen editing, and a Picture-in-Picture tool for multiple video layers.

This is a comprehensive and versatile tool for video creation. It's a fantastic all-around video editor for students, social media managers, and anyone who wants to create polished-looking videos without a steep learning curve.

Grammarly is more than just a grammar checker; it's a comprehensive writing assistant that helps you communicate more effectively.

Grammarly is an all-in-one AI writing assistant that elevates your communication across all platforms, from a quick text message to a critical business report. It goes beyond a simple spell-checker to become a comprehensive partner in the writing process.

With features like its AI-powered writing assistant, Grammarly can generate, rewrite, and refine text, helping you overcome writer's block and ensure your message is clear, confident, and perfectly tailored to your audience.

The app offers real-time feedback on grammar, punctuation, style, and tone, while its vocabulary enhancement suggestions help you choose the most impactful words. It seamlessly integrates with over 500,000 apps and websites, including popular platforms like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and email clients.

For our team, it has been an invaluable tool for proofreading, catching subtle errors we might miss, and ensuring all our written content maintains a professional and consistent voice.