Hey,
This week: the AI news worth your time up top, then a batch of new tools we just added to the directory (sorted by the job you are doing), plus five roundups if you want to go deeper.
This week in AI
AI video's leaderboard just got flipped. The models that led a year ago are sliding off the charts. Runway's Gen-4.5, ranked first at launch, has dropped out of the Artificial Analysis top 10, while ByteDance's Seedance and Alibaba's HappyHorse now sit at the top and Google's Veo 3.1 keeps the audio crown. OpenAI, meanwhile, quietly retired its standalone Sora app in April; the model now lives only inside ChatGPT. If you chose a video tool six months ago, it is worth a fresh look.
"AI" in your copy might be turning buyers off. In a WordPress survey reported by TechCrunch, roughly 60% of US consumers said seeing "AI" in a brand's messaging is a turnoff, and about 86% said they check the original source after reading an AI summary. The takeaway for anyone shipping content: lead with the result, not the letters.
We counted, and "free" is rarer than it looks. Our new data study went through 696 AI tools and found only 7% are truly free, 53% are freemium, and 35% are paid-only. Useful context the next time a homepage shouts "free" at you. Read the breakdown.
New in the directory
Heads up: the tool links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As always, that never affects our scores or what we recommend.
AI Video
InVideo — type a prompt, get a finished video with scenes, voiceover, and music. It pulls in models like Kling, Veo, and Runway, so it doubles as a one-stop workflow.
PixVerse — fast text- and image-to-video that stands out for stylized and anime looks and effect-driven shorts.
Hailuo AI — one of the stronger free tiers for text-to-video, with impressive motion quality.
AI Image & Photo
Skylum (Luminar Neo) — a desktop AI photo editor for photographers: one-click sky swaps, relighting, and precise AI masking.
YouCam — AI photo and selfie studio: headshots, retouching, makeup try-on, and avatars.
OpenArt AI — many image models in one place, plus consistent characters and custom style training.
Audio & Notes
HappyScribe — transcription and subtitles in 100+ languages, with both AI-fast and human-accurate options.
HyNote AI — an all-in-one AI note-taker: record meetings or drop in PDFs, videos, and links, then get summaries and action items you can chat with.
Slides & AI Office
Present Intelligence (Pi) — turns a prompt or a document into a structured, interactive deck, not just static slides, in about two minutes.
Skywork AI — AI office agents that produce source-cited docs, slides, spreadsheets, even podcasts and web pages from a single brief.
Flowith — an agentic AI canvas: instead of one chat thread, agents research, write, and build across an infinite workspace in parallel.
Build & Grow
Appy Pie — no-code builder for apps, websites, chatbots, and automations, now AI-assisted end to end.
Klaviyo — email and SMS marketing built for ecommerce, with the segmentation and automation flows DTC brands rely on.
Featured roundups
Go deeper
The 50 Best AI Tools in 2026 — our flagship shortlist across every category, tested and priced.
Best Free AI Video Generators — which tools actually let you ship a clip without paying.
Best AI Photo Editing Tools — editors ranked on retouching, masking, and free tiers.
Best AI Presentation Tools — from prompt to polished deck, compared head to head.
Best AI Note Takers — meeting assistants tested across Zoom, Meet, and Teams.
Prompt of the week
Should this tool earn a spot in your stack?
Before you commit to any new tool above, paste this into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini:
You are a pragmatic tools analyst. I am evaluating [tool name] for [my use case]. Give me: (1) the one job it is clearly best at; (2) two tasks I should NOT use it for; (3) the closest alternative and when I would pick that instead; (4) a 15-minute test plan to decide if it earns a spot in my stack. Be blunt and skip the marketing language.
That is the issue. One careful email a week. No hype, no ads.
ToolChase is reader-supported and ad-free. Some links in this email are affiliate links, and they never influence our scores or rankings.