TOP LAUNCHES

Automate the boring stuff

TOP LAUNCHES

• Asteroid spins up browser bots for your back office in seconds. You point it at a web form or dashboard, tell it what to do in plain language, and it handles everything, from filling quotes to pulling invoices and even dodging CAPTCHAs.

• Indy AI by Contra lives in your browser. It scans your LinkedIn and X feeds, filters out the noise, and surfaces only the gigs that actually match your skills. No extra apps, no endless scrolling.

• AI Thing stays off the record until you say so. It scans your screen on demand, understands spreadsheets or dashboards, and fires off multi-agent workflows in parallel with zero data leaks. One click, total privacy, no background recordings.

• Poe’s new API gives you a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint to tap Claude, Imagen 4, Veo 3 and other top text, image, video, and audio models. Swap between them or combine their outputs without juggling separate keys or bills.

• ClueoAPI lets you pick tone, emotion, and style for any reply in one call. ClueoAPI takes plain output and makes it sound sarcastic, earnest, tired, or whatever flavor fits the moment so responses stop reading like canned noise.

WHAT’S HOT

Google Search refuses to die

You can bury the premature predictions of Google Search’s death at the hands of AI. Turns out, LLMs have been a boon for the advert–er, search, company. 

According to an article last week in the Wall Street Journal, search revenue from April through June was up 12% from the same time last year, making it Google’s best quarter ever.

What’s going on? At least three things:

• Users are digging Google’s AI Overview tool, which grew from 1.5 billion monthly users in the first quarter to 2 billion monthly users in the second.

• Ummm, it owns the world’s biggest browser, in case you forgot. Why navigate to ChatGPT for everything when you can peck something into your search bar and get back a decent AI response? (Which is why OpenAI and Perplexity are releasing their own browsers.)

• It can pay for whatever it wants. In the past, it’s purchased Android to stay relevant for mobile search, doled out dollars to Apple to have Safari default to Google search, and, oh yeah, spent a ton on AI computing to head off Microsoft.

But Google’s always adjusting its formula (just ask any sad content creator who would’ve been rich if that pesky algorithm hadn’t changed). This week, the company unveiled an experimental feature called Web Guide. It’s like a hybrid of Search and AI—you still get the links front and center like the Google of old, but they’re organized using generative AI. It may just mean that the thing that finally kills the Google algorithm is…Google.

TRENDING DISCUSSIONS

Get seen by the bots

Stop begging for AI to notice you and start acting like it’s just another customer. Lindsay Amos lays out a playbook so straight it hurts:

First, find the places your buyers actually hang out, such as Slack, Discord and niche forums, and speak their language. Drop the buzzwords. If you can’t explain what you do in five words or less, you’re invisible.

Next, build channels you own, like a paranoid newsletter, mini-podcast or private Discord, and feed reporters real stories they can’t ignore instead of pitching press releases nobody reads.