Microsoft’s AI chatbot is called Copilot (formerly Bing Chat). It’s a combination of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and the Bing search engine, so it’s always accessing the internet to give updated results.

This chatbot lets you upload files and switch between Quick Response and Think Deeper, depending on the topic you’re researching. Copilot Daily is included if you want a daily, AI-generated podcast of the top news stories; you get to pick the voice.

In addition to conversation threads, which are supported by most chatbots, this one also includes Pages, which Microsoft describes as an interactive canvas that lets you turn responses into editable and shareable pages. It’s a “digital place for generating, organizing, and refining content in real-time.”

Copilot works in Edge and most other browsers, including Chrome. There’s also a shortcut to it on the Windows 11 taskbar.

Some AI tools that can search the web don’t discriminate, meaning they use the whole internet in each search. This might be helpful sometimes, but it doesn’t make much sense other times. iAsk.AI is built differently to target forums, academic sources, news, books, and more.

Just type something into the box, pick the length you want the response to be, and choose a category so that it uses specific kinds of sources to generate results. I’ve been getting great answers using it for all sorts of queries.

For example, I was curious about how a specific medical procedure works, so I searched only for academic sources. I also used the forums tab to get a list of gift ideas for a woman who likes cats, so it referenced Reddit and some pet-focused websites for answers from real people.

Another tool on this website, called Summary, makes consuming long text much easier. It will build bullet points for any text or URL you give it.

Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot. It’s fun to play with and easy and intuitive to use. Like ChatGPT, it accepts text input to help you write code, generate stories, look up information, and more. It’ll even analyze an image you send, meaning you can ask questions about a photo.

Here are some other things I appreciate:

• Precise location access provides relevant responses to where I am.
• Results can be converted into a new Gmail message or exported to Google Docs or Sheets.
• It connects to Google Calendar, meaning you can add events in bulk with just a screenshot of them.
• Previous chats can be pinned at the top of the page for easy retrieval.
• Results can be read aloud.
• Conversations can be shared via a link.
• Images can be generated.
• Pick a different response without typing everything out again.
• The extensions/apps are free and easy to turn on and off.

This website is great whether you do or don’t like ChatGPT. Bagoodex is like a marketplace for all the top AI chatbots, so you can use OpenAI’s option or one from another company—Grok, Claude, DeepSeek, Character.ai, and others are available.

You can get help coming up with a website name, translating some text, generating images, writing poems, planning a trip, solving math problems, and lots more.

Free accounts get two image generations and basic search, chat, and writing features. Paid plans are available if you need to loosen those limits.

Character.AI lets you chat with an agent that’s preconfigured as someone specific—celebrities, religious figures, and game characters are a few neat ones I tried. The chatbot gives off the illusion that you’re chatting with that character.

Some characters are built for fun; talk to Shakespeare, Einstein, Harry Potter, and Bill Gates. But there are also so-called “helpers” that can be used as psychologists, creative guides, trip planners, spirituality coaches, etc. Other topics include language learning, philosophy, and history. There’s a lot to pick from!

If you’re interested in building a character, you can spin up a new one in no time (it took me about a minute). Character.ai also lets you create voices based on short audio clips. Creations can be private or public.

You can pay if you want priority access, faster response times, and a few other features.

Sure, ChatGPT can help with your broken code or general programming questions, but Phind takes it to the next level with constant access to the internet for up-to-date help and filters to adjust how results are ranked.

In my example in the screenshot above, I learned I missed a character in my code. Phind identified what I was trying to do with that code, searched the internet for reasons it doesn’t work, and fixed it. If I wanted to learn more about how the answer was found, I could dig into the sources that were provided.

Before you ask Phind something, you can force it to ignore search results if you prefer. It also accepts image input. If you make a user account, you can access Code mode to chat side-by-side with your Python code.

This is a great resource for beginners, and I can see myself using it more as I dive deeper into software development. It’s free, but there are pro plans for more flexible usage and extra features like video generation.

Most free AI chatbots are useless if you need to analyze text from a document. ChatPDF can help by first identifying what in the document your question is most likely referring to, and then it leverages ChatGPT’s power for the answer.

All you have to do is upload a PDF and then ask a question, just like you would in ChatGPT. You can also share a URL to the document so someone else can run questions by it.

I tried this with a 115-page document about something notoriously confusing— health insurance policy details— and it worked quite well! It only took a few seconds to come back with an answer. I had a few questions for it, and each time I was given helpful and factual answers (I looked manually to verify). It even tells you which pages it found the answers on.

You can use this alternative to ChatGPT on two documents per day as long as they don’t exceed 120 pages. Paying users don’t have a daily limit or question limit, and can get answers from 2000-page PDFs as large as 32 MB each.

The idea behind this free ChatGPT alternative is simple: It makes any writing flawless.

To use it, just paste or type something into the box. It can be any text—notes, stories, emails, blog posts, etc. Then, pick conversational, formal, or semi-formal for the writing style. It’ll spit out the same stuff you wrote in just a few seconds, but this time you can feel confident that it’s grammatically correct.

I tried this several times with completely different text, both long and short samples, and it did surprisingly well. I recommend this for anyone who struggles with general grammar rules or who isn’t quite fluent in English. The result can be copied to the clipboard.

Copy.ai offers way more than just text summarizations, but I mention this first because it’s awesome at it. I have found it super useful for really long essays, blog articles, and lists I just don’t have the time to fully read.

As you can see in the screenshot, I fed it a URL, and it quickly and accurately read and understood the task. I got the same results with countless articles I tested. You’ll love using this if you find yourself skipping interesting articles just because they’re too long to get into right now.

Check out Copy.ai, and you’ll find it’s like ChatGPT on steroids, chock-full of countless valuable qualities. Below are some of the coolest features I found to help me write social media descriptions, generate blog ideas, and even write a birthday card.

• Create your own brand voice to generate content in line with your brand.
• Easily reuse important data by adding text or uploading files to your Infobase.
• Build workflows. One example lets you turn a content brief into a full blog post with a relevant meta description.
• Attach Word documents or PDFs
• Organize everything into project folders.

The free plan is fine if usage stays below 2,000 words in the chat; it includes access to ChatGPT 3.5 and Claude 3. Paid plans include the latest LLMs, plus unlimited words, projects, brand voices, and more.

Writesonic has called itself the best ChatGPT alternative for content creation. It uses Google to access the web automatically, so its content is always fresh. I also tried the Chrome extension to help me write directly in Gmail and other places like X (formerly Twitter) without having to leave the page.

Here are some features worth mentioning:

• Includes a plagiarism checker.
• There’s a Chrome extension for content suggestions anywhere you write online.
• Suports image generation.
• Feed it documents, images, audio files, and URLs.
• Custom directions to personalize all the responses.
• Zapier and WordPress integrations.
• GPT-3.5 for free users.
• Download results as a DOCX file.
• View sources to verify answers.

Free users have limited credits, model access, and AI generations. You can subscribe to lift those restrictions and get additional features like an SEO checker, voice generator, and much more.