5 New AI Tools Worth Trying This Week (October 2026)

It’s been a packed week for AI launches. Five tools stood out — some free, some cheap, all worth knowing about.

Here’s the quick rundown, then the details.

1. IrisGo — Free AI Workflow Automation

IrisGo hit #1 Product of the Day on October 7th, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a desktop “AI operating system” that learns your workflow by watching what you do, then automates the repetitive parts.

Still in free beta. If you drown in admin work, start here.

2. OpenAI’s Decisions API

Launched in public beta on October 6th. Instead of returning long essays, this API returns structured verdicts — typed decisions your app can act on directly.

Pricing is $0.10 per million input tokens. OpenAI claims it’s roughly 10x faster than the Responses API for decision-type tasks. That speed claim hasn’t been independently verified yet, so take it with a grain of salt. But the concept is solid: sometimes you don’t need a paragraph, you need a yes or no.

If you build apps, this one’s worth exploring.

3. Suno Speech

Suno — the AI music company — expanded into speech on October 1st. Suno Speech combines voice narration and music in a single track.

Think podcast intros, video voiceovers, audiobooks with background scores. The free plan has download limits, but it’s enough to test whether it fits your workflow.

Content creators should pay attention to this one.

4. ElevenLabs Eleven v4

Announced September 28th. The new voice model supports 90+ languages and adds in-sentence expression tags — meaning you can mark up text to control tone, emphasis, and emotion within a single sentence.

This is a meaningful step up for anyone doing voiceovers, dubbing, or audiobook production. The expressiveness gap between AI voices and human voices keeps shrinking.

5. Claude Haiku 5.5

Anthropic launched this on October 7th at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. That’s frontier-class pricing for a small model.

It also comes with a 1-million-token context window. For cheap, fast AI tasks — classification, extraction, simple Q&A — this is now one of the best value options available.

Which Should You Try First?

• Drowning in repetitive work? IrisGo (free beta)
• Building apps that need decisions? OpenAI Decisions API
• Making audio content? Suno Speech or ElevenLabs v4
• Need cheap AI at scale? Claude Haiku 5.5

Three of the five are free to try right now. No excuses.