AI tools for research
A rundown of the best AI research tools for reading papers faster. Connected Papers maps related studies visually, Elicit searches 138 million papers, and Paper2Audio reads them aloud. Stanford's STORM drafts Wikipedia-style articles, which makes it a fun one to try. 7 picks from the Bez Tytułu newsletter, in reading order.
The picks
Connected Papers: A Visual Tool for Finding Related Research
Tool · connectedpapers.com · Issue #13
Connected Papers is a visual tool that helps researchers and applied scientists find academic papers relevant to their field. It builds a graph of related publications from a starting paper, which the newsletter notes suits students writing academic work.
Elicit: AI Research Assistant
Tool · elicit.com · Issue #189
Elicit is an AI research tool that searches academic literature, covering 138 million papers and 545,000 clinical trials, and produces reports with sentence-level citations. It can extract data from papers, support systematic review screening, save sources in a library and track new research. It also offers an API and an MCP server, and its site has a "Try Elicit for free" button.
Paper2Audio: Text-to-Speech for Research Papers
Tool · paper2audio.com · Issue #243
Paper2Audio is a text-to-speech app that reads research papers, books and other documents aloud, skipping citations, reference lists and footnotes. It summarizes tables, graphs and images, and offers a library for offline listening. The app emphasizes readers with limited sight, ADHD or dyslexia. It was founded by Joe Golden and Chandradeep Chowdhury, and its free tier allows 56 hours of audio generation per week.
Unriddle (Anara): AI Research Workspace
Tool · unriddle.ai · Issue #165
Anara is an AI research workspace reached through this link. It searches over 300 million papers and the web, answers questions across your own files, and drafts writing with citations that link to the exact passage in each source. It also extracts data from papers into tables and exports to Word, LaTeX and BibTeX. It is aimed at researchers, students and professionals who work with scientific literature.
STORM: Stanford's AI Article Writer
Tool · storm.genie.stanford.edu · Issue #187
STORM is a Stanford AI experiment that builds structured, Wikipedia-style articles from scratch by generating topic outlines first. It is still in development.
Felo: AI Search and Creation Platform
Tool · felo.ai · Issue #192
Felo is a multilingual AI platform for searching, researching and creating content. It can generate AI slides, mind maps, documents, images and webpages, and offers an AI agent, an API and an LLM playground. The site calls itself a free AI platform for research and creation, and it also shows an upgrade option for paid tiers.
Talk to Books (Google)
Tool · books.google.com · Issue #60
A Google experiment built on machine learning that lets people explore ideas and discover books, with sample searches showing archived results. The page describes it in the past tense, suggesting it may no longer be available.