AI Applications
A curated collection of practical AI tools designed to save time, boost productivity, and simplify everyday work. These tools help with content creation, automation, analysis, and smarter decision-making all in one place.
ChatGPT can be genuinely useful in research and PhD studies when used correctly. It helps researchers think faster, not lazier by refining research questions, structuring literature reviews, improving academic writing, clarifying complex concepts, and checking logic and flow. Used responsibly, it saves time on repetitive tasks and frees researchers to focus on what actually matters: critical thinking, methodology, and original contribution. It’s a support tool, not a replacement for academic judgment and when treated that way, it becomes a real advantage.
Bohrium can also be a useful support tool in research and PhD studies, particularly for discovering and organizing academic literature. It helps researchers quickly identify relevant papers, track citations, and manage references more efficiently. When combined with tools like ChatGPT, Bohrium supports both sides of research work: finding the right evidence and making sense of it. Used properly, it reduces time spent searching and organizing, allowing researchers to focus on analysis, interpretation, and producing higher-quality research.
Kimi AI (by Moonshot AI) is built for handling very large documents. Its key strength is an enormous memory (up to 2 million tokens), allowing it to read and analyze dozens of PDFs, full books, or multi-year reports at once. Instead of summarizing pieces in isolation, Kimi connects ideas across thousands of pages. It’s especially useful for complex research comparisons, financial or legal trend analysis, and long-form content like transcripts or books. In short, Kimi AI is optimized for heavy data and long-document understanding, making it a strong competitor to GPT-4 in this area
DeepSeek is a strong open-source, low-cost alternative to paid AI tools, making it ideal for researchers and PhD students especially those who need privacy or offline use. It offers two key models: DeepSeek-V3 for fast writing, summarization, and general tasks, and DeepSeek-R1 for advanced reasoning, math, coding, and logic. Its main strengths include offline literature analysis, powerful R and Python coding, accurate LaTeX generation, and simulating critical peer review. DeepSeek is accessible via web, mobile app, or a low-cost API, and stands out for delivering high academic value without high subscription fees
Google Gemini 1.5 Pro is ideal for PhD students and researchers needing to handle massive amounts of text. Its 2-million token context window lets you upload and synthesize 10–20 full papers or entire thesis drafts at once, finding connections humans might miss. Paired with NotebookLM, it allows you to interact with your documents directly, even generating audio summaries for on-the-go review. Gemini excels in literature review, data analysis, coding, and writing, especially when integrated with Google Docs, Sheets, and Drive. Compared to ChatGPT or DeepSeek, Gemini’s strength is large-scale synthesis and ecosystem integration, while others are better for polishing writing or complex math and coding.
Consensus is an AI tool built for evidence-based research, helping users quickly find peer-reviewed studies and get answers backed by citations. It highlights what the scientific consensus actually says, making it ideal for literature reviews, fact-checking, and evidence-based decision-making. Instead of long explanations or generic summaries, Consensus delivers direct, reliable insights drawn from published research
SciSpace is an AI-powered research assistant designed to make navigating scientific literature faster and more efficient. It allows researchers to upload PDFs and instantly generate summaries of key findings, methods, and conclusions. Users can ask targeted questions about the content and receive answers grounded in the paper itself, while important sections can be highlighted, annotated, and organized for easier reference. SciSpace also translates complex technical language into plain, understandable explanations, making even dense papers accessible. This makes it particularly valuable for literature reviews, staying up-to-date with new research, and quickly grasping the essence of multiple papers, saving hours of manual reading and allowing researchers to focus on analysis, critical thinking, and generating insights.
Asta (by the Allen Institute for AI) is an AI tool built for researchers to solve a major problem with chatbots like ChatGPT: fake citations. Think of it as “Google Scholar on steroids”—it searches a database of over 200 million real academic papers to answer questions with 100% verified citations. Asta finds relevant papers, summarizes them, and links directly to PDFs or DOIs, making it highly reliable for PhD students and researchers. Unlike ChatGPT or Gemini, it prioritizes accuracy over creativity and is largely open-source. It’s best used for finding, verifying, and summarizing real scientific literature, complementing tools like Gemini for synthesis, DeepSeek for coding/math, and ChatGPT for writing.
Google NotebookLM is an AI research assistant designed for PhD students and researchers, emphasizing grounded, source-based answers. Unlike ChatGPT, it only uses the documents you upload, avoiding hallucinations and providing inline citations. Key features include an Audio Overview that converts papers into a podcast-style summary, a Synthesis Matrix to compare methodologies and findings across multiple papers, and a Reviewer 2 Simulator for critiquing drafts. It allows up to 50 sources per notebook, making it ideal for literature review, reading triage, and structured analysis, while leaving actual writing to the researcher or other tools.
Qwen AI (by Alibaba Cloud) is an all-round AI assistant for researchers, excelling in coding and visual data extraction. Its specialized models—Qwen-2.5-Coder for Python/R coding and Qwen-VL for interpreting charts, graphs, and images—make it ideal for turning visual data into CSVs and automating scripts. It supports multiple languages better than many competitors and can run locally for privacy-sensitive work. For PhD students, Qwen is best used alongside tools like Gemini (reading/synthesis), DeepSeek (math/reasoning), and NotebookLM (organizing sources) whenever you need code generation or visual analysis.