Last week, I fell down a rabbit hole. What started as a quick search for new AI tools turned into a 40-hour exploration across Product Hunt launches, obscure subreddits, and startup databases. My mission? Find AI tools that are not ChatGPT, Midjourney, or the usual suspects everyone keeps recommending.
And honestly? I found some absolute gems hiding in plain sight.
These are not the tools with million-dollar marketing budgets. They are the scrappy underdogs built by small teams solving real problems. Some have barely 10,000 users. Others are growing so fast they might not stay hidden for long.
Here is what I discovered.
1. Napkin AI: Turn Any Text Into Professional Diagrams in Seconds
Remember struggling with Microsoft SmartArt back in 2010? Napkin AI makes that look prehistoric.
Here is what grabbed me: you paste any block of text, whether meeting notes, a project outline, or even a messy brain dump, and Napkin instantly transforms it into a polished visual diagram. We are talking flowcharts, mind maps, org charts, and process diagrams that actually look like a designer made them.
Why it matters: I tested it with a 500-word strategy document. Within 8 seconds (I timed it), I had three different visualization options. The AI understood the hierarchy, identified relationships between concepts, and even color-coded different categories automatically.
The catch: No direct integration with PowerPoint or Google Slides yet. You will need to export as PNG or SVG and import manually. But for the time it saves? Worth the extra step.
Best for: Consultants, project managers, teachers, and anyone who has ever wasted an hour trying to make a flowchart look presentable.
Price: Free tier available, Pro starts at $15/month.
2. Goblin Tools: The ADHD-Friendly Task Destroyer
Okay, this one has a cult following for a reason, but I bet you have not heard of it.
Goblin Tools is a collection of small, focused AI utilities designed specifically for people who struggle with executive function. The star feature? Magic ToDo takes any overwhelming task and breaks it into tiny, manageable steps. If you are looking for more ways to boost your output, check out our Best AI Productivity Tools Guide.
Real example: I typed clean my apartment before guests arrive tomorrow. Instead of leaving me paralyzed, it broke it down: 1. Gather all dishes from living room. 2. Load dishwasher. 3. Wipe kitchen counters… and 12 more hyper-specific steps. Each step felt doable. That is the magic.
But there is more. The Formalizer rewrites casual text for professional contexts. The Judge estimates how long tasks will actually take (spoiler: we all underestimate). The Estimator helps with time-blindness.
Why it works: Most productivity tools assume you can just do the thing. Goblin Tools understands that sometimes your brain needs the thing broken into 47 microscopic pieces first.
Price: Completely free. Donations accepted.
3. Descript: The Video Editor Where You Edit Words, Not Timelines
This one changes everything about how video editing works.
Descript transcribes your video automatically. Then, and here is the wild part, you edit the video by editing the transcript. Delete a sentence from the text? The corresponding video clip disappears. Rearrange paragraphs? The video rearranges itself.
But the feature that made my jaw drop: Overdub voice cloning. You train the AI on your voice (takes about 10 minutes of reading sample text), and then you can type any new words and it generates them in your exact voice. Made a mistake in your recording? Just type the correction. No re-recording needed.
The use case that sold me: A podcaster friend used it to fix an episode where she mispronounced a guest name three times. Instead of re-recording, she just typed the correct pronunciation. Done in 30 seconds.
Privacy note: Be aware of their updated terms regarding voice data. Worth reading before you clone yourself.
Best for: Podcasters, YouTubers, course creators, and anyone who has ever said um 47 times in a recording.
Price: Free tier (limited), Creator plan at $24/month.
4. Tally: The Form Builder That Feels Like Magic
Google Forms is fine. Typeform is pretty. But Tally? Tally is something else entirely.
It works like a document. You just start typing questions. No drag-and-drop interface, no confusing menus. Type a question, hit enter, type the next one. The AI figures out what kind of input field you need based on context.
Type What is your email? and it automatically creates an email field with validation. Type Rate your experience and you get a rating scale. Type Upload your resume and boom, file upload.
The integration game is strong: Native connections to Notion, Slack, Airtable, Google Sheets, and dozens more. Set up a form in 2 minutes, have responses automatically populate your project management system.
What surprised me: It handles conditional logic beautifully. If user selects Option A, show these questions. If Option B, skip to the end. Complex branching that would take 20 minutes elsewhere takes about 45 seconds here.
Price: Free for unlimited forms and responses. Paid plans add custom domains and advanced features.
5. Gamma AI: Presentations That Build Themselves
I used to spend 3-4 hours building slide decks. With Gamma, my last presentation took 11 minutes.
Here is the workflow: describe what you want to present. A pitch deck for a sustainable coffee subscription startup targeting millennials. Gamma generates a complete presentation, including structure, content, placeholder images, and design, in about 60 seconds.
But unlike other AI presentation tools that give you garbage you have to completely redo, Gamma output is actually usable. The content is structured logically. The design is modern and clean. You will want to customize and add your own data, obviously, but you are editing 80% of a finished product instead of starting from scratch.
The interactive element: These are not static slides. You can embed videos, add collapsible sections, include interactive elements. It is more like a web page that presents like a deck.
My honest take: It will not replace a professional designer for your Series A pitch. But for internal presentations, client updates, course materials, or quick proposals? Absolute game-changer.
Best for: Consultants, educators, startup founders, and anyone with too many presentations and not enough hours.
Price: Free tier with 400 credits, Pro at $10/month.
6. Suno AI: Create Complete Songs From a Text Prompt
This is where AI gets genuinely weird (in the best way).
Suno does not just make background music. It creates full songs, with vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation, from a text description. An upbeat indie folk song about missing your dog while traveling produces an actual song. With a singer. Singing words about your dog.
The first time I tried it, I laughed out loud. By the fifth song, I was genuinely impressed by the musical coherence. The AI content creation market is exploding, and music is no exception.
What it is good at: Catchy hooks, genre accuracy, and lyrics that mostly make sense. The vocal quality has improved dramatically. Early versions sounded robotic, but recent outputs are surprisingly human.
What it struggles with: Complex song structures, subtle emotional nuance, and anything requiring genuine artistic innovation. It is great at sounds like but not at sounds new.
Practical uses: Content creators needing royalty-free music, game developers building soundtracks, marketers creating jingles, or anyone who has ever said I have a song idea but can not play instruments.
Price: Free tier (limited generations), Pro at $10/month.
7. Lindy AI: Build AI Agents Without Writing Code
Most AI agent platforms feel like they were designed by engineers for engineers. Lindy took a different approach.
Their Agent Builder uses what they call vibe coding. You describe what you want the agent to do in plain language, and it builds the logic for you. Create an agent that monitors my email for invoices, extracts the amounts, and adds them to my expense spreadsheet becomes a working automation without a single line of code.
The Autopilot feature is wild: Your AI agents get their own virtual computer in the cloud. They can browse websites, fill out forms, click buttons, basically do anything you could do manually. One user automated their entire invoice processing workflow: the agent downloads invoices from email, logs into their accounting software, enters the data, and files the documents. All while they sleep.
Why this matters: We are moving from AI that answers questions to AI that does work. Lindy is leading that transition for non-technical users. Curious where this is all heading? Read our AI predictions for 2026.
Best for: Small business owners, operations managers, and anyone drowning in repetitive digital tasks.
Price: Starts at $49/month.
8. Fathom AI: The Meeting Assistant That Actually Understands Context
I have tried every AI meeting tool. Otter, Fireflies, Grain, all good. But Fathom does something different.
It does not just transcribe. It understands what matters.
After each meeting, you get a summary organized by topic, with action items automatically extracted and attributed to the right person. John agreed to send the proposal by Friday appears in John action items, not just floating in a transcript somewhere.
The highlight feature: During live meetings, you can click to mark important moments. Fathom creates clips of those specific sections, timestamped and ready to share. No more scrubbing through hour-long recordings to find the 30 seconds you needed.
Integration depth: It pushes action items directly to Asana, Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, and more. Meeting ends, tasks are already in your project management system. Zero manual entry.
What convinced me: Free unlimited recording on Zoom. Most competitors charge per minute or limit your storage. Fathom is betting that once you experience it, you will pay for the advanced features.
Price: Free tier is genuinely generous, Pro at $19/month.
9. Cleanup.Pictures: The One-Click Image Editor Everyone Needs
Sometimes you do not need Photoshop. You just need that random person removed from your vacation photo.
Cleanup.Pictures does exactly one thing: remove unwanted objects from images. And it does that one thing better than anything else I have tested. For more visual AI tools, see our Best AI Image Generator Guide.
Upload a photo. Brush over the thing you want gone, a person, a sign, a power line. Click Clean. Watch it disappear while the AI reconstructs the background behind it.
What impressed me: The reconstruction quality. Removing a person from a beach photo, it actually understood sand texture, wave patterns, and shadow angles. The result looked completely natural.
Speed: Most edits complete in under 3 seconds. Complex removals might take 10.
The limitation: It is not magic. Removing something that takes up 70% of the image will not give great results. But for typical photo cleanup? Perfection.
Price: Free for standard resolution, one-time $5 purchase for HD.
10. Fliki: Turn Blog Posts Into Videos Automatically
You wrote a great article. Now your social media manager wants a video version. Before Fliki, that meant hours of work or expensive freelancers.
Paste your article URL. Fliki reads it, creates a script, generates AI voiceover (in your choice of 75+ voices), finds relevant stock footage, and compiles everything into a shareable video. The whole process takes about 5 minutes.
The voice cloning angle: Train it on your voice, and the video narration sounds like you, even if you never recorded a word. Record a 2-minute sample once, generate unlimited voiceovers forever.
Multilingual support: The same video can be generated in 75+ languages. Your English blog post becomes a Spanish video becomes a Hindi version becomes a Japanese version. The AI handles translation and generates native-sounding speech.
Reality check: The videos will not win Oscars. Stock footage can feel generic. But for LinkedIn posts, YouTube shorts, or repurposing content across platforms? It does 90% of the work at 10% of the cost.
Best for: Content marketers, bloggers looking to expand into video, and social media managers juggling too many platforms.
Price: Free tier available, Standard at $28/month.
What These Tools Tell Us About Where AI Is Heading
Spending 40 hours with these tools taught me something. The most useful AI is not trying to do everything. It is laser-focused on specific problems.
Napkin does not try to be a design suite. It just makes diagrams brilliantly. Cleanup.Pictures does not compete with Photoshop. It just removes objects flawlessly. That focus is what makes them so good.
We are past the AI can write anything phase. We are entering the AI that does this one thing better than you ever could phase. And frankly? That is way more useful.
The Tools I Am Watching Next
A few others caught my attention but need more testing:
- Nessie – Unifies your conversations across ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools into a searchable brain
- Motion – AI calendar that auto-schedules your to-do list around meetings
- Bardeen – Browser-based automation that watches what you do and suggests ways to automate it
I will report back once I have spent more time with them.
Your Turn: What Did I Miss?
These are the hidden gems I found. But the AI landscape changes weekly. Tools launch, tools pivot, tools suddenly get acquired and shut down.
What obscure AI tools have you discovered? Drop a comment. I am always hunting for the next find.
And if you want more discoveries like this, we publish weekly roundups of the newest AI tools worth your attention. The good stuff, no fluff.
Happy exploring.
