ChatGPT was the first AI robot that a lot of people used, but now there is a lot of competition. As more models come out, they offer a wider range of benefits, such as the ability to remember conversations longer, respond with empathy, and be based on your own data.
I’ll save you a dozen Google searches (or ChatGPT questions). I talked to some of the best AI robots to find out how they stack up. There’s a little of everything here, like ChatGPT alternatives that can help you write content, AI chatbots that can search the web, and some choices that are just for fun. You can even learn how to make your own AI robot if this page doesn’t have what you need.
More AI robots are likely to come out between now and when you read this. For now, though, these are the most interesting ones to keep an eye on.
How do AI chatbots work?
First, let’s talk about how ChatGPT works so that you can understand how AI apps work. This will help you understand why the AI apps below are interesting and how to make the most of each one.
OpenAI created ChatGPT so users could communicate with its AI models GPT (the first series) and o1 (OpenAI’s latest). You type questions into the app, which are sent off to an AI model which processes your query through its systems before sending back results back to ChatGPT so you can read them like a robot would.
Features provided by the app include saving conversation data. Our AI model interprets what you say and calculates an answer; take a look at our comparison between ChatGPT and GPT to gain more insight.
OpenAI’s GPT models power many of the apps on this list; however, app creators can provide additional instructions to alter how the model responds.
Even though these chatbots use similar engines, you may experience different results when using each chatbot. Furthermore, this list features apps that use non-GPT models; typically these models are unique to each company that designed an app.
How we selected the best AI chatbots?
I chose to only include apps that are being worked on right now and getting better quickly for this update. Because this area changes so quickly, it makes sense to choose tools that can adapt to those changes as quickly as possible. Besides that, these are the things I looked for when I tried each AI chatbot online:
- AI model quality. The app’s engine needs to give good answers all the time, quickly and fairly accurately.
- Conversational experience. The app and the AI model need to work together to make a good user experience, from the results you get to the freedom to choose how to complete the tasks you give them.
- Chat app tools. Does the app let you do more than send and receive messages? Are you able to search the web, make pictures, charts, or small dashboards?
- Integration with a core app or other apps. Some chatbots are designed to add more features to a platform, while others are designed to connect to many third-party apps and make their data sources or functions better. There was the best of both worlds in this list.
- Extra features. Besides typing in your prompt and getting the output, anything else is nice, like being able to connect directly to the internet or supporting more than one language.
I’ve looked into it and talked to a few of them, so these are the best AI apps you can try. I’m sure you’ll have fun.
ChatGPT: The original AI chatbot
AI model: OpenAI GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, o1 models, and DALL·E 3
ChatGPT pros:
- Easy to use and honestly kind of fun
- Powerful
ChatGPT cons:
- Chatbots are accessible only through ChatGPT
ChatGPT was the first AI robot. This movie blew everyone away when it came out in late 2022. In 2023, it put AI back in the news. To start a discussion, just write your question at the bottom of the screen.
As the output comes back, a new item is added to the menu on the left. This way, you can keep each thread separate and come back to them later. You can share a link to any of these that you think other people would find interesting and let them pick up where you left off.
ChatGPT is still the leader in its field for now, even though it sometimes makes factual mistakes (hallucinations) while acting with complete trust.
Also, OpenAI is trying to fix these hallucinations by making the AI work through difficult problems more slowly with the latest o1 model family, which is now available to Plus and Teams users. The AI will no longer be able to just act on the first idea it has.
It keeps track of what you’ve said in each chat and uses that information to give you more accurate results in the future. It can take text commands, which lets you format and change the results.
It’s also very adaptable and can do jobs in any field with a good level of accuracy—just make sure you check the facts. You can share your conversations with other people and give the bot your own directions to make it even more unique.
ChatGPT can now run on a multimodal model called GPT-4o (for paid users) or GPT-4o small (for free users). This makes things even more interesting. It’s very fast and lets you do a lot of different things, like text-to-image prompting, data analysis, and voice chats.
The cutting edge doesn’t end here; OpenAI is already working on its Google Search killer. SearchGPT, which is still just a pilot, will use GPT technology along with online searches to find the best answers to any question you have.
It’s still not clear when (or if) it will come out, but you can join the line to find out more.
Using GPTs, you can even make your own bot with its own data and directions. It’s possible for these bots to do simple jobs, make things easier, or just do weird things for fun.
Claude: Best for creating interfaces with Artifacts
AI model: Claude 3 Haiku, 3.5 Sonnet, and 3 Opus
Claude pros:
- Tends to respond more empathetically than ChatGPT
- Large context window
Claude cons:
- Context window and daily message limit vary based on demand for users on a free plan
Meet Claude. Anthropic’s robot wants to be honest, helpful, and safe. The talk flows naturally, and people answer directly to the questions. There aren’t any long introductions or endings, which is something that ChatGPT sometimes likes to do.
It looks like the length of the context window is fine. It’s great that Claude can remember up to 150,000 words per conversation because that means you can upload PDFs, ask questions, or talk until the sun comes up. In some measures, Claude 3.5 Sonnet also does better than GPT-4o, which is a surprise in the AI LLM leaderboard.
But without a doubt, Artifacts is the best part. You can make a dashboard page with buttons to change your data if you need to with just a few steps, like this personal budget manager. There were even people who could make animations and simple games (check out this Claude-made physics game).
You can see and change these works while you chat, so you can connect with them and change them right away. To turn them on, go to the bottom-left corner of the screen and click the main menu. Then, click Feature Preview and turn it on.
In addition to Artifacts, Claude helps you put papers, code, or files into Projects so that you can quickly find the information you need and keep your workspace neat.
It used to be that the free plan only let you send 25 messages a day, but now it seems that this depends on demand. The app will let you know when you’re getting close to the limit. The Pro plan costs $20 a month and gives you access to more.
Meta AI: Best for leveraging an open license
AI model: Llama 3.1
Meta AI pros:
- Can create images and animate them for free
- Ability to chat with it directly from WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook
Meta AI cons:
- Limited extensibility
Meta just put out Meta AI, which can only be used in the U.S. for now. For instant chat, use your Facebook or Instagram account to sign in. You can request generated pictures and even small animations. You can also make short videos, but the system doesn’t seem to be working well yet.
It’s pretty good, but the model sometimes hallucinates sources and isn’t afraid to say what they think without any doubt. It does not have a web search tool to improve the answers, so make sure that everything is correct if it is important. In this way, it seems like a more basic model that is ready to be tweaked and changed to fit certain business goals or use cases. When you add your data and business logic to it, you have a good engine for thinking based on facts.
This gets us to the open licensing framework that is very generous.
As a developer, you don’t have to pay anything to use the Llama models to build or improve your apps until you make a lot of money. These rules were made to keep other big tech companies from using Llama. This way, most businesses of any size could use this AI model for free—they only had to pay for the hardware that did the calculations.
The Meta AI website says that this engine might become fully integrated with the company’s social media sites in the future. It’s already there in some of them. Read the ChatGPT vs. Meta AI study to find out how it compares to other models.
What’s the best AI chatbot for you?
“The answer to this question really depends on what you want to use the chatbot for,” says ChatGPT. There are a lot of different AI robots out there, and each one has its own pros and cons. Great job.
Keep in mind that most of these AI robots use the same language model as ChatGPT. Even the ones that don’t sound a lot alike if you really think about it.
The apps are mostly different in how you can use them, what extra features they have, and how they connect to other tools you use. You can try out almost all of these AI apps for free, so take a day and do that. It will be interesting, at the very least.