50 AI Tools That Save Me Hours Every Week

From Joe’s workshop

Every AI tool I’ve built (so far) 🤖

Here’s the deal. Over the last couple of years I got a little obsessed. Every time I caught myself doing something repetitive with AI (transcribing a video, cleaning up a prompt, pulling text off my screen) I’d stop and think, “Why am I doing this by hand?”

So I’d build a tool. Then another. Then another. This page is the whole pile, organized so you can actually find what you need.

Most of these run right on your Windows machine with AutoHotkey. A few use the cloud, a few run AI locally so nothing leaves your computer. The ones with a link (you’ll see a little ↗ next to the name) are ones you can grab for yourself. The rest are experiments, some half-baked, some just for me. That’s the fun of it. Time is the one thing you can’t buy more of, and every one of these gives a little of it back.

What AI tools can you build with AutoHotkey?

Way more than you’d think! This page lists 50 I’ve built: transcription (Parakeet, Transcriber), text to speech and voice cloning, writing helpers (ScoreMyCopy, AI Prompt Assistant), smart file renaming and search, OCR, background removal, video subtitles, and tools that help write AutoHotkey itself (AI Error Assist, V1 to V2 Converter).

Do these AI tools run locally?

Some do. They all run on your Windows PC with AutoHotkey, but the AI part varies. A few send work to the cloud, and a few run the AI locally (like Parakeet and Transcriber (Local LLM)), so nothing ever leaves your computer. Look for the ↗ next to a name: those are the ones you can download.

How AI Built a Page Listing All My AI Tools


How AI Built a Page Listing All My AI Tools


 

Have a look around. If one of these solves a problem you deal with every day, that’s a win. 🚀

50
Tools
9
Categories
21
For sale

🎙️ Turning talk into text

I talk a LOT faster than I type. These take audio and video and hand you clean text, from live dictation to “transcribe this whole file and summarize it for me.”

AI Audio Transcribe ↗

Record on the fly or drop in a file, and it turns your speech into text with Whisper. Simple, fast, and it lives in your tray ready to go.

AI Audio Transcribe (WinRT) ↗

Same idea, but it grabs the audio straight from Windows instead of FFmpeg. One less moving part on your machine.

StreamSpeechToText ↗

Real-time dictation that types the words right where your cursor is as you speak. I run it with a foot pedal, which honestly feels like a superpower.

Transcribe and Summarize ↗

Point it at a recording and you get the transcript AND a summary. Right-click a file and go. Great for long meetings you’d rather not sit through twice.

Transcribe with OpenRouter

A little one-shot experiment: pick an audio file, send it through OpenRouter’s audio model, and copy back the text. Bare-bones on purpose.

Transcriber ↗

My workhorse. Transcribes, summarizes, and even whips up a YouTube thumbnail from your media. Right-click and Send-To make it effortless.

Transcriber (Local LLM) ↗

Same tool, but the summarizing happens on a local model. Nothing leaves your machine, and you’re not paying per call.

Parakeet

Drag a video onto it and it spits out subtitles right next to the file, all running locally on your GPU. No cloud, no waiting.

Transcribe Media (frozen build)

The rock-solid “known good” version of my full transcribe app, with speaker labels and filters. When I want something that just works, this is it.

Talk to AI ↗

Ask a question out loud and get an answer back from ChatGPT or Claude. It’s the closest thing to just having the AI in the room with you.

🔊 Making the computer talk back

Sometimes reading is slower than listening. These read text out loud, from plain clean voices to a clone of a real one with actual emotion.

Text to Speech ↗

Highlight text, hit a hotkey, and it reads it aloud with a natural AI voice. You can save the audio too. I use it to catch clunky writing by ear.

AI Clone Speak

Reads your selected text in a cloned voice through ElevenLabs. One hotkey, and there it is.

AI Clone Speak with Inflection ↗

The fun one. Drop tags like [excited] or [whispers] right into your text and the cloned voice actually acts it out. Way more human than flat narration.

✍️ Better writing, faster

Writing eats time. These help me score copy, match a client’s voice, and sharpen prompts before I send them.

ScoreMyCopy

Feed it a headline or product name and it grades it against the character limits and marketing basics: who’s it for, what’s the offer, where’s the reader in their journey. Takes the guesswork out.

Borrowing Writing Style

Keeps a profile of how each client writes so the AI can sound like them, not like a robot. Handy when you juggle a lot of voices.

AI Prompt Assistant ↗

Helps you build and polish a prompt, then fires it off to your AI of choice without leaving what you’re doing.

🗂️ Finding and fixing files

Point AI at a folder and just tell it what you want. Rename a mess of files, filter down to what matters, or search by meaning instead of exact words.

SmartFileRenamer

Describe how you want a folder of files named and the AI proposes the whole batch. No more renaming 200 files by hand. 😊

SmartFileSearch

Tell it what you’re after in plain English and it hands back only the files that match. Like having someone dig through the folder for you.

SearchOnConcept ↗

Drop in your docs, audio, and video, then ask a question. It finds the right file AND the exact page or timestamp where the answer lives. This one still amazes me.

Embeddings Doc Search

Semantic search over the AutoHotkey help docs. Type a concept, get the right help pages, even when you don’t know the exact command name.

🖼️ Working with images and video

Pixels in, results out: read text off the screen, make icons, strip backgrounds, chop up videos, burn in subtitles, and even generate animations.

AI OCR ↗

Drag a box around anything on your screen and it pulls the text out with AI vision, and it’ll translate it too. Text trapped in an image is one of my pet peeves, so this one gets used a lot.

IconCreator ↗

Type what you want, and it generates an image and saves it as a proper multi-size .ico. Every one of my tools needs an icon, so I built the tool that makes them. 😃

RemoveBackground

Drop an image, get it back with the background gone. Runs locally, so no API key and no upload. Fast and free.

Segmenter ↗

Breaks a video into logical chapters for you. Great for turning one long recording into bite-sized pieces.

Translate & Subtitle Video ↗

Generates translated subtitles and burns them right into the video. Reach a whole new audience without touching a video editor.

RemotionWrapper

Describe an animation in plain English (or pick a template) and it builds and renders the video for you. Motion graphics without the headache.

🛠️ Tools for building tools

A lot of what I do is AutoHotkey, so I built AI helpers for AHK itself: fixing errors, converting between versions, and inspecting what’s on screen.

AI Error Assist ↗

Your script throws an error, and instead of googling it, this sends the error and the code to an AI and hands you back a fix. Saves so much frustration.

AI Chat ↗

The same Error Assist idea, licensed and ready to hand out. Send an error or a chunk of code and get help back.

ErrorCapture ↗

Sits quietly in the background and catches your AHK errors the moment they happen, then logs them. Set it and forget it.

V1 to V2 Converter

Turns old AutoHotkey v1 code into v2. Meant to live inside your editor so upgrading old scripts stops being a chore.

V2 to V1 Converter

Goes the other way and flags anything tricky, with an optional AI pass to help with the parts that don’t map cleanly.

UIA Tree Inspector

Point at any element on screen and browse its accessibility tree, with an AI sidebar to help you write the automation. If you’ve ever fought with UIA, you know why this exists.

AutoHotkey Chat Rules

A quick hotstring that pastes my coding-style rules into an AI chat, so whatever it writes actually follows my conventions.

Figma (experiment)

An early design experiment. Not finished, but I keep it around because half of learning is the stuff that didn’t pan out.

⚡ Getting more out of the models

Working with the AI itself: comparing models, sharpening prompts, sorting out API keys, and running things right in the browser.

ModelBenchmark

Lists every OpenRouter model with its cost and context size, then runs a benchmark so you can see which one actually performs. Don’t guess which model to use. Measure. 😊

PromptImprover

Hit a hotkey and it rewrites your rough prompt into a much better one. A tiny bit of polish makes a HUGE difference in what you get back.

PromptStarting

Type your thought, and it opens a fresh Claude chat with a “keep it short and accurate” prefix already in place. Removes the friction of starting.

AI Hotkeys

AI-powered lookup and search shortcuts wrapped into one build. Answers a keystroke away.

ApiKeyIdentifier

Paste in a mystery API key and it tells you which service it belongs to. A small thing, but it’s saved me plenty of head-scratching.

GeminiNano

A web page that generates text with Chrome’s built-in on-device model. No server, no API key, no cost. The future is getting weird in a good way. 🤖

🤖 Assistants and automation

The bigger builds: voice interpreters, a live helper for sales calls, and command-line harnesses that drive other apps for you.

AI Interpreter

Speak, and it transcribes, runs your words through the AI, and speaks the answer back. Three models working together so you can just talk.

HeroCallAssistant

Listens to a live call and quietly surfaces helpful suggestions in real time, with you in the loop to approve them. Like a smart co-pilot on the phone.

AHK CLI (MCP)

A command-line “ahk” that lets AI validate, run, find, kill, and inspect scripts. This is how I let AI actually drive my AutoHotkey work.

CLI-Anything

A shared skin that gives all my little app-driving harnesses (GIMP, Blender, Inkscape, Audacity) the same clean, colorful terminal feel.

Claude Skills Viewer ↗

A clean dark viewer for browsing all the Claude Code skills you’ve got installed. Handy once your collection grows.

📚 Notebooks and data

Front-ends over the stuff I keep coming back to: research notebooks, contacts, and my to-do list.

NotebookLM Desktop

A desktop front-end for Google’s NotebookLM: create notebooks, add sources, and grab the results without living in the browser.

CardSnap

Pulls all my contacts down to a local database and a simple spreadsheet, so I can text and email people in bulk right from the PC.

VoiceToDo

A simple desktop client for my to-do list that syncs with the phone app. Topics on the left, tasks on the right, check them off as you go.

That’s the whole workshop. Some of these took an afternoon, some took weeks, and a few started as “this’ll never work” and turned into things I use every single day.

One thing I’ve learned: you don’t need a giant plan to start automating. Pick the one repetitive task that annoys you most, and take a swing at it. Worst case, you learn something. Best case, you never do it by hand again. 🚀

Want to learn to build stuff like this yourself? Come check out the courses over at the-Automator.com/Discover. They come with a 200% money-back guarantee, so you’ve got nothing to lose. 😊

Happy automating,
Joe Glines

👀My Vegas Adventure | AHK News 2026-07-18

AutoHotkey Newsletter

Howdy,

I flew home to Dallas Tuesday but thought I’d share with you the “adventure” I went on last Friday (after the Hero calls).

I met up with Mary Carol (the woman that put together the “AI Event” for Sabrina Ramonov).

We were supposed to meet up for lunch and discuss AI but things didn’t go quite as planned.

She called me from the road to let me know she had a flat. 

We agreed I’d meet her at a tire shop instead of the restaurant.

Sadly things took a turn for the worse when it turned out, the tire was not the problem.

her rim was cracked

and they don’t do rim repair.

At this point it was mid-afternoon on Friday and places were “shutting down” for the weekend.

Luckily one place did call her back and said if we can get them the rim they could have it ready by Monday.

I agreed to follow her to the shop and then would give her a ride home.

Luckily we got to the shop early enough so the crew could weld it and she’d be out of there that day❗

She told me I could go but I was worried she might end up stranded so I waited.

While we waited she apologized about taking up my afternoon.

I let her know that it was fine because that is what I do❗

I help people solve their problems

Whether I help them during Hero calls, during Consultations, or just solving random problems.

That is what drives me!   What drives you❓

Now on with the show…

Learn how to Master VSCode Make the switch to v2 Intro to AutoHotkey Intermediate AutoHotkey Intermediate ObjectsGUIs are Easy w/AutoHotkey Access all our Courses; Quit when you want

v1code


Are you a Micro (AI) Manager❓

We had a very interesting discussion during a Hero call regarding how much time you should be spending looking at your code.

Isaias started off going “deep” on the bad approach AI chose but I countered with the “who cares” response.  You can be the judge by watching it here.

Stop Micromanaging AI Code 🎯 Let the Model Think | Hero Extract

Stop Micromanaging AI Code 🎯 Let the Model Think | Hero Extract


Asking Gurus

The Hero group is amazing for having live experts to talk to.  I liked the idea so much that I created a Claude Skill entitled AskGurus which lets Claude bounce its ideas off other AI models.

I discuss the approach in this extract from the Hero call.  I firmly believe being able to get more than one opinion (whether it is AI or human) is the simplest way to get better solutions in life!

The “Guru” Skill That Makes AI Models Compete 🏆 For You | Hero Extract
The


Building a “mini” editor

Kenneth, a Hero member, liked the idea of our Quick Raw Edit tool but wanted the ability to be more precise in the “cuts”.

After discussing with AI that, in order to edit frame-by-frame we would have to add ffprobe.exe (another 150 meg download) tool, I proposed we let him edit down the 100th of a second. 

He agreed that would be fine so we added it to the tool.  I was showing off the changes during a Hero call when we came up with a couple other ideas that I went ahead and implemented

(Letting users cut out the middle instead of rip the selection and adding the Wave form so we can see the audio).   Check out the discussion here.

We’re Accidentally Building a Video Editor 🎬 And It’s Getting Out of Hand | Hero Extract

We're Accidentally Building a Video Editor 🎬 And It's Getting Out of Hand | Hero Extract


A quick look at Cursor

Ryan Wells is no stranger to the newsletter and our YouTube channel. 

I used to use Cursor but I went with Claude code (via VS code) instead of sticking with Cursor. 

Ryan and I typically bounce ideas around developing AI tools off each other nearly every day (are you sensing the trend❓) however we rarely “show” each other how we are developing our code.

I asked Ryan to lead us on a mini-session on using Cursor to develop tools. 

He blew all of us away and left us wanting more!   You can check out the great intro to Cursor in this video. 

I’m curious, what AI tools are you using %name% to develop code❓

How to Use Cursor Like a Pro 🚀 Projects, Models & Skills Explained | Hero Extract
How to Use Cursor Like a Pro 🚀 Projects, Models & Skills Explained | Hero Extract


Improving People’s Lives: Story #102

While at my father’s house in Las Vegas I installed a smart thermostat for him.  He’s still getting used to the idea that he can change the temperature by an app on his phone but I think he’ll get used to it.

What is the last smart device you’ve added to your home❓


📚 What we’re reading


🤖 AI News that you Need to Know


⚡️Productivity tips:  

Learn how you can make your QR codes smaller


🤣 A spot of Humor:

New Rule: Grad GPT | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
New Rule: Grad GPT | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)


What we 🅰utomated this week with AutoHotkey #136

This week was packed. I gave AI a 10-minute plan before bed and woke up to a fully working concept-search tool it built overnight, one that reads PDFs, Word, Excel, audio, even video and finds things by meaning instead of exact keywords.

I also show off a live call assistant that matches my spoken words to website products in real time, a video progress-bar burner I threw together in 30 minutes, a faster AI icon creator, and a bunch more.

In this week’s video I walk you through all of them and how AI is letting me build complex tools in hours (instead of weeks).


Clients say…

Joe! All I can say is WOW! — Stephanie Holland


Cartoon superhero mascot in green costume beside the bold text AHK Hero on a yellow background AHK Hero 🦸

Consider joining the 🦸Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc.    Currently we have over 578 hours of recordings teaching AutoHotkey that is exclusive to Hero members❗

You can watch 1 hour a day for a year and not repeat content! That’s a lot of Learning!

During this Friday’s call we’re planning to discuss:

  • Help Hero Members with their Questions & Code
  • Using AI to create a Website (Plusses & Minuses)
  • Hidden Toast messages, License, API keys, etc.
  • Adding a progress bar to videos
  • Updates to NoticableText
  • Updates to tAHKskbar
  • WordpAHKd
  • AHK Shutdown Fix❓
  • Potential New ways to Automate with AHK

They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and 3 hours a week where we help people with their automation issues (the Saturday calls are geared towards people new to Automation with AI)


🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes

  • Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think — Ayn Rand
  • You can acquire more of anything in life, except time — Simon Sinek
  • Soon companies will have 2 employees: 1 man 1 dog. The man is there to feed the dog. The dog is there to keep the man from messing with the AutoHotkey script — Joe Glines

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the-Automator  Dedicated to Multiplying your Income

Joe, Isaias, Irfan and staff


P.S. The intro story is the “short version” of our afternoon.  In the end Mary Carol got her car back in working condition and invited me to an online AI meetup which was fun.

I’m beginning to plan an in–person Dallas meetup.  If you’d like to attend reply to this email and let me know❗