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🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.

This week: tools to clone yourself (ethically, of course).

If you’re a marketer, freelancer, or business owner, your to-do list is probably a mile long.

Making time to be “present” online, recording videos, taking phone calls, or even just taking new headshots, always takes more time than you anticipated. It’s often the first thing to slide when deadlines loom.

But what if you could outsource your digital presence to an AI that looks and sounds (almost) like you? Let’s check out these 3 apps.

Plus: a hilarious but brutal app to stop you from procrastinating, a simple mindset shift to protect you from online scams, and a recent MS Windows update fail.

HeyGen

Tired of spending hours in front of a camera? HeyGen lets you create a realistic AI avatar of yourself that can present videos for you. Just type a script, and your digital twin delivers the lines.

It’s impressively realistic. You can use it to create talking-head videos for online courses, product tutorials, or marketing clips without ever pressing the record button. Of course, you can also use their library of stock avatars if you’re not quite ready to create your own digital double. ​

I’ve been testing it and I’m impressed with the results. Sure, it’s still AI, and it needs some tweaking, and a trained eye can spot it – but does it really matter (now or in the near future) if something was AI generated as long as it’s good?

What’s worse: never making that video you’ve been putting off for the last six months, or publishing an AI-generated one that feels just a little bit AI? That’s up to you to decide, but I know which option I would pick!

🛠️ Alternative to: Synthesia, Deepbrain AI, Colossyan

👉 Visit: heygen.com​

💰 From $24/month | Free plan available

ElevenLabs

If you want to clone your voice (but not necessarily your face), ElevenLabs is the tool to beat. The quality is astonishingly realistic, making it one of the best voice AI tools I’ve ever tried.

You can use it to generate audio for anything from YouTube videos, to podcast ads, or even entire audiobooks. All in your own voice, just by typing out the text. The platform gives you fine-grained control over emotion and delivery, so the output sounds (most of the time) natural and engaging, and not too robotic.

One of their cleverest features is the development of AI Agents. Imagine having a customer support bot that can respond to inquiries in a consistent, friendly, and human-sounding voice. I need to test this agent soon.

🛠️ Alternative to: Murf.ai, Resemble.ai

👉 Visit: elevenlabs.io​

💰 From $5/month | Free plan available

Descript

Already a fantastic all-in-one tool for editing podcasts and videos (I use it for our videos), Descript has a killer feature that fits perfectly with our theme: AI Avatars.

Like HeyGen, it lets you create a digital version of yourself. But where Descript shines is its integration into your entire editing workflow. You can record a video once, create your AI avatar, and then generate new video content by simply typing.

Do you need to fix a mistake or add a new sentence to a recording? No need to re-shoot. Just type the correction, and your AI avatar will say it for you. When I use it, though, I stick to short sentences or individual words, because longer phrases can sound a bit off.

A must-have for video podcasters, content creators, and marketers who want an all-in-one solution for recording, editing, and generating AI-driven video.

🛠️ Alternative to: Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Camtasia

👉 Visit: descript.com​

💰 From $16/month | Free plan available

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

I was scrolling through Product Hunt the other day when a name caught my eye: MomClock. I had to click, and I’m so glad I did. This isn’t your average productivity app; it’s a hilarious and surprisingly effective dose of tough love.

MomClock helps you stick to your routines with the kind of loving-but-stern energy only a mother can provide. You set your goal, like “Finish that report by 3 PM”, MumClock will block your distracting apps and even show hilarious messages on the screen when you try to use those apps.

I’ve been playing around with it, and the “harsh love” approach is weirdly motivating. It’s designed to make you feel just guilty enough to get back on track. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s a great idea.

🛠️ Alternative to: a real mom, Japanese anti-procrastination cafes, the pomodoro technique

👉 Visit: momclock.com​

💰 Free

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

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January 13th was a bad day for Windows users. In a classic case of "the cure is worse than the disease," Microsoft’s routine update turned into a nightmare for many.

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The update, intended to secure PCs, ended up bricking some machines running Windows 11. Users who installed it were met with the dreaded "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" error, rendering their computers completely unbootable. As BleepingComputer reported, Microsoft had to rush to investigate while users were left with dead hardware.

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My approach to updates is the same as crossing an old rickety bridge: I’ll cross it, but I like to let a couple of people go ahead first.

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll dive into some amazing tools to help you learn new skills faster.

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Cheers,

Josep

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