These app developers are the force behind seven game-changing businesses. They’ve successfully combined their personal passions with powerful AI tools to give you the framework to tackle your goals – such as learning a new language, staying on top of your to-do list, building beautiful designs easily and more.

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App Store Award winner Tiimo colour-codes your tasks and appointments on an elegant timeline to make busy days feel more manageable (see video below). And its friendly and supportive AI chatbot is always there to help you navigate your packed schedule – and troubleshoot along the way.

AI advantage: Before creating Tiimo, co-founders Melissa Würtz Azari and Helene Lassen Nørlem were at the IT University of Copenhagen studying how technology could help adolescents who are neurodivergent.

“Our research into neurodivergence shaped Tiimo’s AI co-planner, especially its tone of voice and behaviour,” Azari says. “Research shows that many neurodivergent people are more sensitive to rejection and negative feedback, so it was essential for us to create a forgiving, friendly and non-judgemental tone.”

Fine-tuning that tone started with “a big file about Tiimo’s personality”, Azari explains – a central repository for their prompt engineering that leveraged insights from their research. For instance, Tiimo will never bring up users’ past mistakes or failures, even if they didn’t check off any of their tasks in a day.

“Many of our users also place very high expectations on themselves when they first start using the app,” Azari says. “The co-planner is built with an awareness of this pattern and aims to gently guide users towards more realistic, achievable plans rather than reinforcing perfectionism.”

Don’t miss: The subtask feature uses Apple Intelligence to break down complex to-dos. “It’s one button and it really has a big impact,” Azari says.

Known for its vast library of design templates and easy-to-use tools, Canva lets you customise images, videos and social media posts by simply describing what you want to see – no design experience needed (see video below).

AI advantage: “For us, it’s really important that you’re always in the loop and that your creativity stays in your hands,” says CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins. “Canva AI creates layered designs, meaning everything it generates is fully editable.”

That’s true of each element in a design, whether a block of text or a background pattern. “You can tweak, refine and evolve your work without starting over from scratch with a brand-new prompt,” she says.

For the team, maintaining artistic control is key. “It shouldn’t be a choice between handing everything over to an automated chatbot or spending hours making small manual changes yourself,” Perkins says. “That belief has really guided how we’ve built Canva AI.”

Don’t miss: Need advice as you’re designing? Tag @Canva in a comment on the project you’re working on and ask for advice.

Since 1965, EF Education First has taught students around the world through its exchange programmes and language courses. With the EF Hello app, it created its most far-reaching language instructor yet: a polka-dotted, AI-powered ladybird named Addi, who can give feedback on your progress and pronunciation in real time.

AI advantage: Addi’s superpowers are all thanks to extensive tagging work the development team has done behind the scenes, says Cecilia Roos, the head of product and generative AI for EF Hello. “Every piece of content is labelled by grammar concept, vocabulary, topic and proficiency level. This makes everything machine-readable, which means Addi can do real-time remediation,” Roos says. “When you make a mistake, she explains exactly why it’s wrong in your native language.”

Pronunciation grading (shown below) was trained using speakers of various ages and with different accents, which lets Addi offer feedback no matter where a user begins their journey. “We’ve also built a robust memory system for Addi,” Roos says. “She knows where you’ve struggled and what you’re working on.”

Don’t miss: The app offers two modes for AI role play. Voice Call is the faster back-and-forth experience, while Voice Message gives you time to collect your thoughts between each exchange. “They both let users practise real conversations in simulated real-life situations – ordering at a restaurant, negotiating a salary or handling a plumbing emergency,” Roos says.

The fashion app Daydream uses natural language and image recognition to seriously streamline the shopping experience. Just drop your specifics into the chat (“Black-tie appropriate structured velvet dress in emerald or burgundy”) and Daydream will scour more than 10,000 brands to deliver options that fit the bill – and personalise the results once it understands your preferences.

AI advantage: “Daydream’s AI translates how people naturally talk about their shopping needs and style into products that actually match their intent,” says founder and CEO Julie Bornstein.

“When a shopper describes what they’re looking for, our AI focuses first on understanding their language, capturing nuance around colour, silhouette, mood, occasion and context,” Bornstein says. “That intent is then interpreted by a set of specialised fashion models, each trained to understand a different dimension of fashion, like social norms, occasion and seasonality.”

Don’t miss: Get more granular with your search by using the More Like This button. No filters here, just natural language descriptors – like “more affordable” or “in red”. “It’s been a total game changer,” Bornstein says. “It dramatically narrows down options and turns ‘pretty close’ into ‘the one’.”

StoryGraph helps you discover books that match your (super-specific) reading vibes – and lets you enjoy them alongside the app’s passionate book-loving community.

AI advantage: Created with input from librarians, StoryGraph’s AI generates book descriptions tailored to you with a very specific mission: it speaks to your unique interests and avoids spoilers at all costs (see video below). “It’s backed by real-world pain points,” says founder Nadia Odunayo, a self-described “spoiler-sensitive avid reader”.

Odunayo and StoryGraph’s chief AI officer, Rob Frelow, also prioritised privacy and environmental concerns when designing their system. “All of the processing is done locally, and user data never leaves the StoryGraph server,” Odunayo says. “It’s a single server, which uses a similar amount of energy to a standard gaming PC.”

Don’t miss: You can toggle on this personalised-and-spoiler-free book preview feature in the app’s preferences.

The journaling app Storia uses AI to provide big-picture perspective based on the daily thoughts and reflections you share. The more you journal (by typing or speaking), the sharper Storia’s insights become.

AI advantage: “Under the hood, we combine a large language model with custom prompting and a scoring layer,” founder Elizabeth Uviebinené says. “When someone completes their check-in, the model interprets what they write or say, extracts emotional and thematic signals, and synthesises them into reflections in natural, human language.”

Storia also analyses the emotions behind the audio entries you record. “This allows the Al to act as a diagnostic partner,” Uviebinené says.

“The biggest surprise has been how much Al lowers the barrier to starting and sticking with journaling,” she adds. “Because it doesn’t feel like a person they need to perform for, people admit things they might soften with friends or even in therapy. That honesty makes the insights sharper.”

Don’t miss: The Echo feature (shown above), which resurfaces your past reflections. “If you were anxious about a career move three weeks ago, the Echo might surface that entry today to show how much you’ve already grown,” Uviebinené says.

By handling the time-consuming academic work of organising sources and formatting everything perfectly, the writing app Essayist frees students, scholars and researchers to focus on the really big ideas.

AI advantage: “We think academic writing should focus on the content and not the formatting,” says Essayist co-founder Erin Guest. “We wanted to save academics and students time.” Podcasts, ebooks, presentations and even direct messages and emails can be catalogued with academic rigour in the app. Using Apple Intelligence, Essayist extracts all the key info needed to use it as a source.

For example, paste a YouTube URL into an entry and Essayist automatically fills in the name of the video, its publication date and the date you accessed it. Drag in an article as a PDF to have Essayist fill in the title, author and more – and store the PDF for easy access (see video below). You can also search for the books and journal articles you’re citing right in the app.

“If you’ve ever tried to format footnotes in another word processor, it’s a nightmare,” Guest says.

Don’t miss: Need to add a perfectly formatted table of contents, abstract or appendix (or three) in your document? Tap the three dots, then select Manage Sections. From there, it’s easy to rearrange any section.

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Apple Intelligence is available in beta. Some features may not be available in all regions or languages.