| Turn a recorded interview into a transcript with timestamps, hear your draft read back to catch what spell check misses, and score your headline out of 100 before you file. | | You know the drill. You land the assignment, the interview goes great, and you’ve got a killer angle. This one’s going to write itself. Then the real work starts. An hour of interview audio to transcribe. Twenty browser tabs of sources you’ll need to cite. A PDF report you have to quote from. Then the draft, the edit, the proof, the headline (all eleven versions of it), and the fight with WordPress formatting. Only part of that is writing. The rest is busywork, and it’s eating the hours (and the word count) you should be spending on the actual piece. Sound familiar? ❓ Here’s the thing: Word, Google Docs and WordPress aren’t the problem. It’s all the little stuff you do around them, by hand, on every piece. That’s exactly the kind of work a computer should be doing for you. So below are the tools I’d hand any writer, blogger or copywriter, most helpful first. Some run on your Windows PC, some run right in your browser. None of them need you to learn anything techy. Click Learn more or Try it on any one for the full rundown. Now on with the show… 😃 | | Research and Interviews: Get It All in One Place 🔎 | Before the first sentence comes the pile: recordings, PDFs, links and screenshots. These turn the pile into something you can quote. | | Tool | What it does for you | Transcriber
Learn more → | Drop in your interview recordings (MP3, WAV, MP4 and more) and get the transcript plus a summary of the key points. Pick OpenAI, AssemblyAI or Claude as the engine, and switch anytime. | Transcribe and Summarize
Learn more → | Transcript, summary, speaker labels and clickable timestamps, so you can jump straight to the moment your source said the good line. You can even clip that bit out as its own audio file. (Uses your own AssemblyAI key, plus Anthropic or OpenAI for summaries.) | SearchOnConcept
Learn more → | Ask your research pile a question in plain English and it jumps to the right page of the PDF or the right timestamp in the recording, even when the wording doesn’t match. Runs on your own machine, on your own files. | MarkItDown
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Browser version → | Turn a PDF report, Word doc or slide deck into clean Markdown text you can quote from or hand to your AI assistant, using far fewer tokens than the original file. | URL Memory
Learn more → | Copy links as you research and it quietly collects them all, cleaned up and de-duplicated. When you’re done, one click gives you the whole source list for your citations and fact-check. | Window Snipping Tool
Learn more → | Grab a region of the screen, pull the text out of it with OCR, or pin it as a floating clip next to your draft. Perfect for the quote stuck inside a screenshot or a chart. | OCR and Translation with AI
Learn more → | Pull the text out of an image with AI, and translate it too. Handy for a scanned clipping or a source that isn’t in English. |
| | Tip: Transcribe the interview, then load the transcript and your PDFs into SearchOnConcept. When you’re mid-draft and think “what did she say about pricing?”, you ask, and it takes you right to it. 😊 |
| | Drafting: Beat the Blank Page 📝 | Get the ugly first draft out. You can make it pretty later. | | Tool | What it does for you | Voice to Text
Learn more → | Hold a hotkey, talk, let go, and your words come back as text on your clipboard, transcribed by OpenAI’s Whisper. Talk out the ugly first draft while pacing the kitchen, then paste it anywhere. 🤖 | Prompt Assistant
Learn more → | Your text expander: author bios, pitch templates, boilerplate, AI prompts and style-guide reminders, organized in folders and fired by hotkey, a short abbreviation or a right-click menu, in any program. | AutoSuggester
Learn more → | Suggests words as you type, based on your own typing. Fewer keystrokes on the character names, product names and jargon you type forty times a chapter. | Clipboard History
Learn more → | Keeps everything you’ve copied, with the time and the window it came from. That paragraph you cut an hour ago (and now want back) is still there. | PromptImprover
Learn more → | Highlight your rough AI request anywhere, press Ctrl+Shift+P, and a clear, detailed prompt lands on your clipboard. Better brief in, better outline back. | Gemini Nano
Learn more → | A private AI chat that runs in Chrome right on your computer. No account, no API key, works even with the internet unplugged. Your unpublished manuscript never leaves your machine. | PomoFocus
Try it → | A focus timer that breaks your writing session into short sprints, with tasks and reports. Works offline. Good for the days the word count just won’t come. |
| | Editing, Proofing and Headlines: Catch It Before the Editor Does 🔍 | Your eye skates right past your own typos. These give you a second (and third) set of eyes and ears. | | Tool | What it does for you | ScoreMyCopy
Learn more → | Paste your headline or title, describe your reader, click Score. It grades it out of 100 using principles from Hopkins, Ogilvy, Caples, Schwartz and Halbert, then Auto Improve keeps rewriting until it hits your target. A swipe file with opinions. | Text to Speech with AI
Learn more → | Select your draft, press F1, and hear it in a natural AI voice. Your ear catches the clunky sentence and the missing word your eye skated past. Press F2 to save it as an MP3 and proof on a walk. (Uses OpenAI’s voices.) | SpellCheck
Learn more → | Spell check that runs in every Windows program, including the CMS text box and email tool that don’t have one. | AutoCorrect
Learn more → | Fixes 4,000+ common English misspellings as you type, in any Windows program. “teh” becomes “the” before you even notice. | Swaparoo
Learn more → | Watches your clipboard and does search-and-replace on whatever you copy. Set it up for your pet typos, a client’s house style or a product name that always gets mangled. |
| | Tip: Before you file, run the piece through Text to Speech with AI with your eyes closed. It feels silly. It also catches the doubled “the the” every single time. |
| | Publishing: WordPress, Docs and the Featured Image 🚀 | | Tool | What it does for you | Naked Clipboard
Learn more → | Paste plain text in any program with the hotkey you choose. No stray fonts or Google Docs formatting junk riding along into WordPress or Substack. | ImageCreator
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Browser version → | Make the featured image for your post by describing it, then fix it by talking to it: “make the sky darker.” It changes just that part and leaves the rest alone. | Noticeable Text
Try it → | Bold or italic text for LinkedIn and other posts where there’s no font picker. Emphasize the one line you want people to read. | VideoToGif
Try it → | Turn a few seconds of a video into a looping GIF for your blog post or newsletter, right in your browser. | WordPress Hotkeys
Learn more → | A sortable sheet of WordPress’s built-in keyboard shortcuts for editing and managing your posts. Less mousing around the editor. | Google Docs Hotkeys
Learn more → | Draft and take edits in Google Docs? A sortable sheet of its built-in keyboard shortcuts, so you spend less time in the menus. | Microsoft Word Hotkeys
Learn more → | Live in Word and Track Changes? A sortable sheet of Word’s built-in keyboard shortcuts to keep your hands on the keyboard. |
| One thing I’ve learned: you don’t need to automate your whole writing process this week. Pick ONE thing on this list that slows you down on every piece. Fix that. Then pick the next one. An hour back on every piece adds up fast. That’s more time for the actual writing, for pitching, and for your family. That’s the real FREEDOM. How about you? What’s the one part of the job (that isn’t writing) you’d love to never do by hand again? Drop me a note and tell me. I read every one. | | See All Our Tools | | the-Automator.com • Windows automation tools that give you your time back |
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