The Best Google AI Tools (I Tried Them All)

0:00Google has now released more than 30 AI tools, and almost nobody knows that most of them are completely free. A few of them are some of the best free AI tools out there right now, but the rest barely work and aren't worth your time. The problem is telling them apart, so I tested every single one and rated it. In this video, I'm going through all of them, showing you each one in action, and telling you exactly which are worth using and which to skip. If the thing you want from Google is a way to make images or video, a few of its tools can do it, but one is clearly the best, and

0:25it isn't the obvious one. The obvious one is generating straight inside the Gemini app, fine for a quick image, but it gives you no control. You just take whatever it hands you. The tool you should actually be using is Google Flow, and what makes it the best is control. Inside Flow, you get a real control panel, so you pick which model runs,

0:40including the latest Nano Banana ones. You set the shape of the image, and you generate several versions of the same prompt at once instead of one at a time. That last part is the whole point, because image models are hit or miss on any [music] single run. So, lining up a few results and keeping the best one beats generating one, hating it, and starting over. And once you land on an image you like, you just tell it what to change. So, I'll type, "Change her plain white shirt to bright red," and it recolors only the shirt. You can even draw over one object on its own, like a

1:06coffee cup on the desk, and tell it to turn that into a glass one. So, only the part you circle changes, [music] and that's a bigger deal than it sounds, because regenerating a whole image to fix one thing changes everything else, too. A slightly different face, a new pose, a different background. Editing just the part you point at keeps the rest of the image locked, so you're refining one image instead of gambling on a brand new one every time. So, if you're making anything where the image actually has to look a certain way, Flow is the one, and it's the clear winner here. The only time you'd [music] reach

1:33for something else is if you need to edit real video rather than generate it. And for that, Google has Vids. It's an online editor with AI built-in, so you can generate videos, record your screen, add voice-overs, and even build a presenter whose mouth matches the words you give it. If your use case is quick marketing or explainer videos, Vids is the better pick, and it's badly underrated. Every one of those tools make something new from a prompt, but the next one does the opposite, taking the information you already have and turning it into something you can actually use. The best AI tool Google has made, the one I'd keep over

2:03everything else in this video, is Notebook LM. The idea is simple, you create a notebook, fill it with your own sources, documents, PDFs, links, whatever you're trying to make sense of, and everything it gives you comes only from that material. That is exactly why it's the best, because it doesn't make things up, it works strictly from what you put in. So, for once you can actually trust the answers. [music] And it doesn't just claim that, it shows you. Every answer comes with a citation you can click that jumps straight to the exact line in your source it pulled from. So, you're never taking its word for anything. That one feature is what

2:31makes it safe to use for real work, where being confidently wrong actually costs you something. And from those sources it builds genuinely useful things. It writes you a study guide, lays out a mind map, turns the material into slides, makes a quiz to test yourself, and creates a podcast-style audio overview you can listen to on the go. So, use Notebook LM anytime you actually need to understand something, a dense report, a topic you're studying, a stack of research you don't have time to read. This is the tool for it. The one thing it still doesn't fully hand you is control over the voices, because you can

3:00shape the format and the length, but not pick the voice for each host. And that's exactly what a sister tool called Illuminate adds. It turns your sources into the same kind of two-host conversation, except you choose the actual voice for each speaker. So, Notebook LM is the one to use and Illuminate is the upgrade if audio is your main thing. Notebook LM is an app you go to on purpose, but some of Google's most useful AI is already sitting in the apps you have open right now. Not every great Google AI tool is a separate app. And honestly, the AI baked into the ones you already use is some of

3:28the most useful of the whole bunch. And the reason it's so useful is that it already has your context. A standalone chatbot starts from nothing, so you're constantly pasting in emails and documents just to ask about your own stuff. The AI inside Gmail or Drive is already sitting on top of all of it, so it can answer about your actual work

3:45without you feeding it anything first. The standout lives in Gmail, and it's a feature called help me write. You You your thoughts into the box however they come out, misspelled, half-finished, out of order, [music] and it hands you back a clean, finished email. This is the one I use every single day, because it turns 30 seconds of messy typing into something I'd actually send. So, use it every time you write an email. Gmail also sorts your inbox into what needs a reply and what's just there to skim, which clears it a lot faster. The other big one is in Drive, a feature called projects, where you pull a set of

4:13related files together, your documents, spreadsheets, slides, and even some emails, then ask questions across all of them which is basically notebook LM living inside your Drive. And in Docs and Sheets, there's a Gemini button that rewrites text, writes your formulas, and through a feature called Canvas, can turn a plain spreadsheet into something interactive, like a chart that rebuilds itself when the numbers change. [music] The rest of the built-in AI is smaller, but still handy. Search has an AI mode that answers your question above the usual links. Chrome lets you save a prompt as a skill and fire it on any page with a slash, and Meet can take

4:44your notes and translate a call in real time. None of these will change your life on their own, but together they make the tools you already pay for quietly smarter. So, if you spend your day inside Google's apps, turn them on. However, all of that still needs you to press the buttons, and Google's next step is to take your hands off the work completely. Google has two tools built to automate your repetitive work, and only one of them really delivers. The one that delivers is Workspace Studio, which is Google's answer to tools like

5:08Zapier, built straight into Workspace. You set up a flow that begins with a starter, like receiving a new email. From there, you hand the process over to Gemini to evaluate and act on the data. For example, when an email comes in, Gemini can read it and determine if it's a new business opportunity. If it is, Gemini automatically applies a sales lead label to the email. Then, it can generate a short summary of the message and extract key details, like the sender's name and email address, logging all of that directly into a Google Sheet tracker. And that last part is what sets Workspace Studio apart from something

5:36like Zapier. A normal automation just moves data between apps based on fixed rules, but with the Ask Gemini step in the middle, the flow can actually read and judge what's coming in, instead of just following rigid if-this-then-that steps, you can pass variables to Gemini like the email body and have it decide if a message fits a specific description, generate context-aware summaries, or even pull in outside information from the web or your Google Drive. It's not as deep as a dedicated automation tool, but for the small repetitive jobs it does the work. So, if you're on a Workspace plan, this is the one to use. The only catch is that it's

6:07part of the paid business and enterprise plans rather than a free experiment. The other tool is CC, an agent that plugs into your Gmail, calendar, and Drive and emails you a briefing every morning on its own. The idea is great, but it's still behind a waitlist and only works on a personal Gmail account rather than a Workspace one. [music] So, for now it's more promising than actually useful. Those tools are the practical end of Google's AI, and now we hit the opposite end, the experiments. Because Google has endless resources, they ship experimental tools constantly and most of them you can ignore, but a few are worth seeing. The most impressive is

6:36Project Genie, which can take a single text prompt and instantly generate a fully playable 3D world that you can explore in real time. If I type a narrow snowy bridge high above the clouds, Genie builds the environment on the fly. Suddenly, I'm navigating this steep icy drop-off with the lighting, shadows, and terrain all being rendered frame by frame as I climb further up the mountain. It's barely more than a tech demo today, but where it's heading could change how games get made, so it's the one to keep an eye on. There's also Disco, an experimental browser that can turn all your open tabs into a small

7:05custom app on the spot, which is one of the more original ideas here, even if it's still rough and waitlist only. And Mixboard is a visual canvas for mood boarding ideas by mixing your own images with AI-generated ones. And it's really handy if you do any art direction. Past those three, the experiments [music] thin out fast. There's a row of learning tools, Learn Your Way, Learn About, and Little Language Lessons that Notebook LM and Gemini already do better, plus a career quiz, a set of word games, and AI versions of public figures you can chat with. All fun for a minute and forgettable after. The one I'd actually

7:34keep is a small game called Say What You See, where it shows you an image and scores how closely you can describe it, which is a surprisingly good way to get sharper at writing prompts. The one phone app actually worth installing is AI Edge Gallery, which runs an AI model entirely on your phone with no internet. So, it keeps working when you have no signal, which is the kind of thing you don't think about until you're stuck somewhere with no service and still need an answer. There's a second reason it matters, too, because the model runs entirely on the phone. Nothing you type ever leaves the device. So, it's also

8:00the private option for anything sensitive you'd rather not send off to a server, which is a real edge none of the cloud tools here can give you. That's the experimental pile, and there's one last group, the one built for people who actually code. For building anything with AI or even just vibe coding a small app, the best tool Google has is AI Studio. It has two sides. [music] One is a playground like Gemini chat, except you pick the exact model behind every answer, the newest image, video, and music models included, instead of being stuck with whatever the app decides to give you. The other side is for

8:28building, where you describe an app in plain words and it writes the code for you. So, if you're building with AI, AI Studio is the one to start with. If that feels like too much, Opal is the gentler version. You describe a small app in plain language and it builds it with no setup, which is perfect for quick little tools. For actual developers, there's more underneath. Antigravity, a coding app that works hands-on with the files on your computer like Claude Code, plus a stack of others. Stitch for design, Jewels for autonomous coding, and Colab

8:54and Code Assist for help while you work. If you write code, those are all there for you, but for everyone else, you can safely skip them. And the catch is that half of these tools will be gone within a year, folded into Gemini or quietly dropped. So, chasing them one by one never ends. What [music] actually lasts is understanding how AI works, and that's why I built AI Fluency, a full set of video lessons that takes you from

9:13the foundations all the way to advanced. So, whenever you're ready to stop chasing tools and get actually AI literate, the link to join is in the description. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.