Best AI chatbots

This category covers two kinds of chatbot. The first is the general AI assistant you talk to yourself, such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. You can ask it to draft an email, summarize a long document, brainstorm ideas, analyze a spreadsheet or explain a contract clause in plain English. The second is a chatbot you put on your website or messaging channels to answer customer questions, capture leads and book appointments. For a personal assistant, compare the free plans first, since they are generous enough for light use. Upgrade when you hit message limits or need features like file uploads, longer documents, team sharing or admin controls. Each assistant has strengths, and it is worth trying the same task in two of them. For a customer facing chatbot, look at how it learns your business information, how it hands off to a human, which channels it covers and how pricing scales with conversations. In both cases, read the data policy. Know whether your chats are used to train models and how to turn that off, especially if you handle customer or patient details. Our guides cite the vendor pages for every price and feature.