The most useful ways to connect your apps to ChatGPT and Claude

Claude and ChatGPT can now be linked to hundreds of services including Superhuman Mail, Google Calendar, Granola, and Readwise via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a unifying standard that lets users control multiple tools from a single AI dashboard. The author, Jeremy Caplan, explains that MCP works like USB for AI, enabling commands such as adding calendar events, querying meeting notes, or editing images in Photoshop without opening separate apps.

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools https://wondertools.substack.com/ , a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I’ve changed how I use Claude and ChatGPT lately. They’ve become my digital dashboards, linked to many of the tools I rely on. I can ask Claude to add to my calendar, query my meeting notes, update me on my email, or find a passage I highlighted in my digital notebook. Claude Connectors and ChatGPT plugins connect to hundreds of services. These include Superhuman Mail for email, Google Calendar, Granola for meeting notes, and Readwise for my online highlights. Read on for how and why to link your favorite tools to your AI https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence assistant, and examples of connections and queries I’ve found useful so far. Claude and ChatGPT know the context for my work because I’ve set up Projects for my primary work areas. Each has detailed instructions and reference documents. And the AI has a memory of the work I do, my style, my preferences, and my objectives. So I can ask my AI assistant to: These multiple-part commands require context. They won’t work in Google Calendar, Raindrop, or Granola directly. That’s why it’s so helpful to have Claude or ChatGPT as the command center. These connectors have a technical name: MCP, or Model Context Protocol https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro . But just as you don’t need to think about USB details when you plug in a printer, or http https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP specifications when you use the Web, you can use MCP without understanding its technical details. All you need to know is that MCP is a way of linking software tools, sites, and apps to AI platforms like Claude and ChatGPT. Remember the world prior to USB? Printers, hard drives, cameras, and external monitors had their own special cords to connect to your computer. I just cleaned out dozens of them from a drawer in my Manhattan apartment. Now they’re obsolete because USB ports are everywhere. MCP is a similar unifying standard for linking tools to AI. I rely on Superhuman Mail https://superhuman.com/refer/8oziogx1 to read, organize, and respond to email. It’s fast, easy to use, reliable, and integrates with my calendar. I use it with three distinct email addresses. Because I have to act on important messages, I’ve linked it to Claude. Some of these tactics will also work with Gmail and Outlook connectors. I use Granola https://go.granola.ai/jeremy-caplan as my notepad during meetings. It transcribes conversations, then creates a summary based on the transcript and my own notes. See my guide https://wondertools.substack.com/p/granolaguide . I can already ask questions about my meetings in Granola without needing a separate AI tool. But the advantage of linking Granola with Claude or ChatGPT is that Claude has access to insights in my notes, email, and Google Drive, so it can integrate the info it pulls from Granola within the context of a broader analysis. Photoshop https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/landpa.html?sdid=NC5FRF5H&mv=search&mv2=paidsearch&ef id=CjwKCAjwpefSBhBvEiwAzyEtZ4YvGCe1vxtSgl814ABLMZq8pAUJD6Z tSIYkb3iW4Mx8nYYDhWwJxoC0-0QAvD BwE:G:s&s kwcid=AL 3085 3 714745362176 e g photoshop 1712238394 67643541820&mv=search&gad source=1&gad campaignid=1712238394&gbraid=0AAAAAD5r4AyfJJPCD5FVaezxeQlSqeStH&gclid=CjwKCAjwpefSBhBvEiwAzyEtZ4YvGCe1vxtSgl814ABLMZq8pAUJD6Z tSIYkb3iW4Mx8nYYDhWwJxoC0-0QAvD BwE and Premiere are powerful but complicated. Now you can edit an image or video without even opening a separate app. Set up the plugin, then tell your AI assistant to use it in your prompt. The AI assistants are often clever enough to figure out which tool to use even if you don’t explicitly mention it. As a test, I changed the first line in an illustration from “Bold” to “Kind.” Notice that the first attempt wasn’t perfect. The period after “Kind” was missing. But a quick edit request fixed that. The Photoshop edit preserved the font, style, spacing, and angle. I use Readwise https://readwise.io/ to collect the passages I highlight when reading online or on my Kindle. It also hosts passages I save when listening to podcasts with the Snipd http://snipd.app/ app. Court Listener https://www.courtlistener.com/ from the Free Law Project https://free.law/ is a handy way of gathering info about court cases. You can ask for records related to Elon Musk’s recent testimony without paying for a legal research service. Substack http://substack.com/ has a new MCP https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/50834026608916-How-to-connect-Substack-to-your-AI-Assistant , available to select publishers as of now. It lets Claude coach me on my analytics. I recently asked for an analysis of send times to figure out how they impact open and click rates. Substack’s help page notes that the MCP has “read-only access to publication data such as dashboard metrics, traffic data, and publication settings. It cannot publish posts, send Notes, or modify your account.” Rize https://rize.io/?via=JEREMY is my favorite tool for time-tracking. I linked it to Claude so I can learn from how I’m spending my time and assess that alongside info from my meetings, email and calendar. The Rize MCP page https://rize.io/changelog/rize-mcp includes use-cases and helped me get started. Rize requires a paid subscription. I use Raindrop https://raindrop.io/ to save links I’ll need later. I checked the Raindrop MCP https://help.raindrop.io/integrations/mcp page to set it up and learn about the kinds of queries I can run from Claude. When I’m doing research in a project, for instance, I can ask it to pull in relevant links I’ve saved. Or I can even ask Claude to put the links from a spreadsheet I’m working on into my Raindrop bookmark collection with appropriate tags. Sublime https://sublime.app/ is another tool I use to save quotes, images and useful pages online. Unlike Raindrop and other well-designed clipping tools like MyMind https://mymind.com/ , which are fully private, Sublime lets me see related material other people have saved. Now I can ask Claude to pull in relevant material from Sublime https://open.substack.com/users/476311708-sublime?utm source=mentions . Decide what kind of connector will be useful to you: Think twice before connecting services that host sensitive info. I haven’t linked my bank accounts to my AI tools, for example. If you do that and someone gets access to your AI account, they’ll be able to find out a lot about your finances. I’m not yet letting AI tools send emails for me. Or submit forms or applications. If Claude or ChatGPT generates something odd because of a glitch, or because I rushed a query, I want to be the one noticing the error. When you start connecting AI tools to external services, you have the option to give your AI assistant power to do things on your behalf. That can be useful for research, summarizing meeting notes, or cleaning up messy computer folders. But you or your AI assistant could make a costly mistake with important info. In a rare but alarming case, Cursor, an AI tool, deleted PocketOS’s company database https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/claude-ai-deletes-firm-database and its backup. A related 2025 case involved Replit https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/ai-coding-tool-replit-wiped-database-called-it-a-catastrophic-failure/ . I haven’t encountered any of these errors. But these services are still new, so you may encounter occasional bugs or blunders. This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools https://wondertools.substack.com/ , a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.