Sponsored by
THE USEFUL TECH
5️⃣ THE USEFUL FIVE · FRIDAY ROUNDUP · ISSUE #011
👋 HEY, IT'S RAJA
Two weeks with Siri AI has made its shape pretty clear. It is very good at finding things inside your phone and taking small actions across Apple's own apps. It does almost nothing about the work that happens around a calendar and an inbox.
Five apps that cover exactly that gap. None of them overlap with what Siri does, which is the reason they earn a place rather than compete for one.
SPONSOR
Antinote, the Mac scratchpad for notes you're going to throw away
Antinote is where everything goes that shouldn't end up in your real notes app: a phone number, a quick sum, a link you need for ten minutes. Press Option-A from any app and it's there, in plain text, with no folders to sort.
It does math as you type, including currency and unit conversions, pulls the text out of any screenshot you drop in, and has a timer built in. The Verge named it one of its favourite things of 2025. It's a one-time $5 purchase with a free trial first.
How 2M+ Professionals Stay Ahead on AI
AI is moving fast and most people are falling behind.
The Rundown AI keeps you ahead of the curve.
It's a free AI newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on the latest AI news, and teaches you how to apply it in just 5 minutes a day.
Plus, complete the quiz after signing up and they’ll recommend the best AI tools, guides, and courses — tailored to your needs.
1️⃣ Krisp, for calls that sound like an office
Krisp removes background noise from your microphone and from the people on the other end, in any app that uses audio. Zoom, Meet, Teams, Slack huddles, recording software.
The part people underrate is the reverse direction. Filtering out the construction outside your own window is useful. Filtering out the dog, the traffic and the open-plan office coming from the other five people on the call is the thing that changes how a meeting feels. It also handles echo and transcribes calls if you want that.
If you take calls from home, a coffee shop, or anywhere near a road, this is the single cheapest upgrade to how professional you sound.
2️⃣ Circleback, for meeting notes you do not write
Circleback joins your meetings, transcribes them, and produces notes and action items afterwards. Not a wall of transcript, but a structured summary with the decisions and the follow-ups pulled out.
Siri cannot do this at all. It has no route into a video call and no way to listen to a conversation on your behalf. It is the clearest hole in what Apple shipped, and the one most likely to matter if your week has meetings in it.
The use I would point at first is not the meeting you attend, it is the one you half attend. The notes are there regardless of how much attention you managed to give it.
3️⃣ Fyxer, for an inbox that sorts and drafts itself
Fyxer connects to your email, sorts it into categories that reflect what actually needs you, and drafts replies in your own voice based on how you have written before.
The drafting is the interesting half. Sorting is a solved problem and plenty of tools do it. Opening your inbox to find a reply already written that sounds like you, needing an edit rather than a blank page, is a different experience. It handles calendar invites and meeting notes too.
My readers get 20% off two months through the link below, plus a seven day free trial, applied automatically.
4️⃣ Cal.com, for scheduling without the back and forth
Cal.com is open source scheduling. You share a link, people book a slot that works, and it lands in your calendar. The comparison everyone makes is Calendly, and the reasons to pick this one are that it is open source, self-hostable if you care about that, and considerably more flexible about routing, buffers and multiple calendars.
Siri AI can add an event once you know when it is. It has no way to negotiate a time with another human. That negotiation is the part that eats the week.
First time subscribers get 20% off their first year through the link.
5️⃣ Wispr Flow, for dictation everywhere Siri is not
Wispr Flow turns speech into text in any app on your Mac, and it cleans up what you said as it goes. The rambling, the false starts, the "actually, scratch that" all get resolved into the sentence you meant.
Apple's dictation exists and works, but it transcribes you literally and lives where Apple decided to put it. Flow is designed for people writing at length, which is a different job from asking Siri to send a text.
If you talk faster than you type, and most people do by a wide margin, this is the one on the list with the biggest gap between how boring it sounds and how much it changes a working day.
The links above are affiliate links, so I earn a commission if you subscribe. It costs you nothing extra, and where there is a discount it is a real one negotiated for readers of this newsletter.
Pick one, not five. The gap in your week is probably obvious to you already.
See you Monday.
A 30-second daily note keeps your Q4 on track
Every evening, write one line in your notes app: what you did today and what got in the way. On Sunday, paste the week into Claude and ask:
"Read this week's notes. What did I finish, what did I avoid, and what is the one thing I should protect time for next week?"
Thirteen of those Sundays and Q4 can't slip past you the way Q3 did.
The Weekly Review Engine is that habit fully built for Craft and Notion: 15 documents, 16 review prompts, a 30-day path to make it stick, and monthly, quarterly and annual reviews already set up. Code Q4RESET takes 25% off it, and off the Craft System Bundle, until 11:59 PM Pacific on October 4.
Keep it useful,
Raja · The Useful Tech
P.S. Enjoyed this? Forward it to a friend who loves their Apple gear a little too much.