38+ tools and resources to improve Zoom, follow the election and to make your autumn a bit easier

Including a tool that automatically transcribes Zoom calls, a tool to make it feel like you’re back in the office and an animated headshot generator.

38+ tools and resources to improve Zoom, follow the election and to make your autumn a bit easier

Pullquote:

“New Zoom alternatives are flourishing this fall. Vowel builds in note-taking and Butter emphasizes a shared visual agenda. I like Around for video meetings because it puts people’s faces in small circles and lets you focus on whatever else is on your screen. Other video conference tools eat up too much screen real estate.

(Screenshot/Around)

A Zoom add-on I’m enjoying lately is Grain, which lets me share highlights from a Zoom meeting. It automatically transcribes the meeting recording. Then I just highlight the transcribed text for key moments to get a shareable video clip to share with colleagues. Here’s a bit more from my recent post on Grain and other new tools. Otter can be used similarly — for journalism transparency — to share a link to recorded audio (with transcribed text) of a particular moment from an interview, meeting or online event. A huge Zoom upgrade is coming with new Zapps, which basically are apps that allow you to use lots of other tools inside Zoom, from Slack and Dropbox to Slido (polling) and Miro (whiteboarding).

Polish up your photo headshot into a free illustration with Dzook. Or, if you’ve got a Wall Street Journal subscription, create an AI-generated hedcut stipple portrait of yourself with your headshot.

Alice is a creative new transcription app specifically designed for journalists with input from reporters. It’s quick and easy to use. I like that you can pause and restart recording and add bookmarks with finger swipes, without looking down at your phone. And once you stop a recording, the MP3 audio file is immediately sent to your email with a Word document transcript shortly thereafter. It’s free to try and then $10/hour for two hours, or $3/hour for 100 hours.

(Screenshot/Alice)

Clipdrop lets you copy and paste something from the real world into a document. Point your phone at something you want to put into a slide or a Photoshop document and paste it in.”