Tired of AI making stuff up? This assistant only answers from peer‑reviewed research

Generative AI is everywhere, whether it’s used as a cornerstone of a service, used to build apps, or employed to boost functionality within them. But with so many new products appearing all the time, which ones are worth checking out?

We’re here to help with a new regular series covering the best and freshest AI apps and services that you should know about.

One of the biggest problems AI assistants face is the broad set of “knowledge” they’re trained on. It’s why you’ll find one referencing that glue is particularly tasty on pizza, or nonexistent legal cases. While these hallucinations have become less ridiculous over time, they’re now far sneakier and tougher to identify with a weary eye. It’s why I’ve started including Consensus in my workflow whenever possible.

Consensus answers the question, “What if Google Scholar were an AI assistant?” by combing through millions of peer-reviewed research papers to provide a broad overview of various topics. This makes scholarly content far more accessible to the common user who might not have the time or mental acuity to read papers from cover to cover.

It doesn’t just lay out the facts, either, but highlights references in a separate pane neatly numbered to correspond with the details in the response. After reading its key takeaway, I can click a reference to get an overview of the paper, view the metadata, or download the full document if it’s available.

Notably, Consensus can be used without an account, which is a huge positive given that many other AI products impose this requirement, though logging in does open up certain benefits. For one, the AI offers a far deeper literature review for members, and various other methods for weighing up data scattered across multiple papers via a Consensus Meter. If you’re looking to win a particularly heated science-based argument, this is how you do it.

Of course, given Consensus’s focus on peer-reviewed research, it’s not exactly a direct foil to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. That’s not really its intent, though. I certainly wish Consensus was available when I was at university, back when Zotero was the most powerful tool on my Celeron laptop.

Other new AI apps and services you should know!

There are plenty of other great new AI apps and services out there, including:

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a small tournament happening this summer. It’s called the World Cup, or something like that? Naturally, plenty of fans flock to stores to purchase football shirts at this time of the decade, but how do you tell if that kit is authentic or fake?

I recently stumbled across an app called KitLegit, which claims to help fans do just that. Snap a pic of the shirt using your phone camera, upload it to the app, and let it do its thing. If the shirt is authentic — or, rather, if the app thinks the kit is authentic — it’ll issue a certificate of authenticity. Given the experience of some football fans online, KitLegit isn’t a 100% foolproof verification method.

While you should always hold apps, especially those that leverage AI, with a healthy dose of skepticism, it’s useful to use an app that points you in the right direction.

Not everyone enjoys the big G looking over their digital shoulders, so while NotebookLM is certainly my preferred smart AI-powered notebook and reference tool, it may not appeal to those degoogling or interested in self-hosting their own solution. That’s where Open Notebook comes in.

It’s effectively an open-source, self-deployable version of NotebookLM, giving users more control over how their data is stored, where it’s stored, and which AI models analyze it (over 18 are optional).

Given these available choices, Open Notebook is a far more advanced tool. You’ll need somewhere to host it and the patience to either learn how to use it or the smarts to do so.

Either way, it’s great to see an open-source alternative to a tool that was previously Google-only or nothing at all.

I spend an inordinate amount of my leisure time looking through guidebooks and atlases, planning future road trips around my country that I genuinely hope to take. Now, I do enjoy manual planning, but I recently stumbled upon Mindtrip, and it may be the sleekest trip planner I’ve used thus far.

It’s difficult to describe Mindtrip, but it’s far more akin to an AI-fueled Wanderlog that takes your prompts and transforms them into skeletons for journeys than a ChatGPT clone geared towards travel. The service provides everything you need to plan a journey, including suggestions for sensible overnight stops, popular attractions along the route, and other tips and tricks.

The Explore section also provides more details on these attractions and encourages users to ask questions. For example, if I were a tourist visiting Cape Town, I could ask Mindtrip about the main routes to the summit. When planning a theoretical trip to the Kruger National Park, I was asked whether I’d prefer to stay in park accommodation or at a luxury lodge. Neat!

It certainly could use a bit of usability polish — it often feels far too clunky compared to its rivals — and I wish I could manually drag the map route to the towns I want to travel through. Nevertheless, given the amount of value you can get from Mindtrip for free before setting up an account, it’s well worth giving it a try for your next adventure.