20 Best AI Chatbots in 2024 – eWeek

These leading AI chatbots use generative AI to offer a wide menu of functionality, from personalized customer service to improved information retrieval.
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Generative AI chatbots are a major step forward in conversational AI. These chatbots are powered by large language models (LLMs) that can generate human-quality text, translate languages, write creative content, and provide informative answers to your questions.
An ever-growing number of generative AI chatbots are now entering the market, but not all chatbots are created equal. We analyzed the best generative AI chatbots to help you determine the best conversational AI app for your business.
Here are our picks for the top generative AI chatbot software.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
We compared the key features of the top generative AI chatbot software to help you determine the best option for your company:
Please note: All ratings are based on a range of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best option.
Microsoft icon.
Microsoft generative AI tool Bing Chat Enterprise uses GPT-4 — which includes a top large language model — to generate natural language responses to users’ queries. Bing Chat Enterprise has three conversation styles: creative, balanced, and precise. These styles help users set the tone for the expected response to their query.
Bing Chat Enterprise is available in 160 regions; significantly, users can also access it via the Windows Copilot Sidebar, making this app easily accessible. Indeed, Microsoft is incorporating AI across their product portfolio, so this chat app will likely show up in a number of applications. If your company uses Microsoft, this chap app is a good choice.
The greatest strong point for the Bing Chat tool is that it’s produced by Microsoft – arguably the leader in AI today. The company’s deep resources and dominant technical expertise in AI software should support this chat app very well in the years ahead.
Additionally, Microsoft is skilled at serving both the consumer and the business market, so this chat app can be configured for a variety of levels of performance – it has the depth of features needed to serve the SMB market and large enterprise.
Bing AI chat is available at no additional cost for customers who are licensed for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, Business Premium, or A3 or A5 for faculty. If you don’t have those licenses, you can purchase Bing AI as a standalone tool for $5 monthly.
Also see: Top Generative AI Apps and Tools
OpenAI icon.
Developed by OpenAI as part of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series of models, ChatGPT is more than just another natural language processing (NLP) tool designed to engage in human-quality conversations with users. The fact that it was developed by OpenAI means this generative AI app benefits from the pioneering work done by this leading AI company – ChatGPT, after all, was the first generative AI app to come to market, launching in November of 2022.
The OpenAI platform can perform NLP tasks, such as answering questions, providing recommendations, summarizing text, and translating languages. Aside from content generation, developers can also use ChatGPT to assist with coding tasks, including code generation, debugging help, and programming-related question responses.
Also supporting this app: OpenAI has received significant funding from Microsoft (and will almost certainly receive still more) so ChatGPT will likely be a leader in the years ahead, both in terms of advanced functionality (depth and versatility of toolset) and its ability to offer technology that’s ahead of the curve.
OpenAI icon.
OpenAI Playground was designed by the same generative AI company that created ChatGPT (see above). As such, it is well funded and is continuously improved by some of the best developers in the AI industry. Expect it to stay ahead of the curve in terms of feature set.
It is a web-based environment allowing users to experiment with different OpenAI models, including GPT-4, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and others. OpenAI Playground is suitable for advanced users looking for a customizable generative AI chatbot model that they can fine-tune to suit their business needs. This advanced platform enables a vast level of choices and approaches in an AI chatbot.
What OpenAI Playground’s focus on customizability means is that it is ideal for companies that need a very specific focus to their chatbot. For instance, a sophisticated branding effort or an approach that requires a very proprietary large language model, like finance or healthcare. Given that this app needs true developer expertise to be fully customizable, it is not the best choice for small businesses or companies on a tight budget.
OpenAI Playground is priced per 1,000 tokens (1,000 tokens equals to 750 words). Pricing for this tool varies based on your chosen model. New users can get $5 in free credit to use for their first three months.
Also see: The Benefits of Generative AI
Perplexity icon.
Perplexity AI is a generative AI chatbot/search/answer engine that allows users to express queries in natural language​​ and provides answers based on information gathered from various sources on the web. When you ask a question on Perplexity AI, it does more than provide the answer to your query –  it also suggests related follow-up questions. In response, you can either select from the suggested related questions or type yours in the text field.
Perplexity AI’s Copilot feature can guide users through the search process with interactive multiple searches and summarized results – this capability is helpful when exploring complex topics. However, it’s limited to five searches every four hours for free plan users and up to 300 searches for paid users.
Perplexity AI’s strength in searching the Internet means this tool is ideal for advanced researchers, from academic to small business to large enterprise, including companies that want to explore how they’re viewed on the Web. The app’s greatest strength: because AI enables it to understand your search query at a multi-dimensional level, the app can guide you in directions you might not have thought of. Think of this app as a “serious researcher’s best friend.”
You.com icon.
Designed by You.com, YouChat is an AI-powered generative chatbot that can summarize text, write code, suggest ideas, compose emails, and answer general questions based on information available on the web.
It also cites its information source, making it easy to fact-check the chatbot’s answers to your queries. YouChat combines various elements in its search results, including images, videos, news, maps, social, code, and search engine results on the subject.
In essence, YouChat is a lighter weight tool with an affordable price plan that performs a wide array of tasks – particularly those needed by students. It certainly would help with most homework assignments. YouChat offers an easy user interface that will appeal to a busy user base that wants to jump right in without undergoing a lot of technical training.
The upside of this kind of easy-to-use app is that, as generative AI advances, today’s fairly lightweight tools will likely offer an enormous level of functionality. So any student or SMB users who starts with it now will probably reap greater benefits in the months and years ahead.
Also see: Generative AI Examples
Writesonic icon.
Trained and powered by Google Search to converse with users based on current events, Chatsonic positions itself as a ChatGPT alternative. The AI chatbot is a product of Writesonic, an AI platform geared for content creation. When using Chatsonic, you can toggle on the “Include latest Google data” button to add real-time trending information.
The benefit to this “latest data” approach is that it helps individuals in the creative industries – like advertising and marketing – to stay very up to date on current trends. In contrast, some of the more advanced chatbots use large language models that are updated only so often, so those looking for this week’s information won’t find what they need.
This current events approach makes the Chatsonic app very useful for a company that wants to consistently monitor any comments or concerns about its products based on current news coverage. Indeed, some companies will use this app in combination with other AI chatbot apps; they may use 1-2 other apps as their main chatbots, with the Chatsonic chatbot reserved specifically to perform a broad and deep brand response monitoring function.
On a related topic: What is Generative AI?
Google Bard icon.
Google Bard is an AI-powered LLM chatbot built on the PaLM2 (Pathways Language Model, version 2) AI model. You can export your Google Bard conversation to Google Docs or Draft in Gmail. The platform also allows you to create a shareable public link you can send to a third party, so this app is very useful in collaborative workflows for professional work environments.
It’s a major plus for this app that it’s developed and supported by Google. Admittedly, this app had some difficulties when it was first rolled out; Google was apparently scrambling to keep up with the phenomenal success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and didn’t iron out all the bugs first. However, Bard is being actively developed and will benefit greatly from Google’s deep resources and legions of top AI developers.
An important benefit of using Google Bard is that its supporting knowledge base is as large as any chatbot’s – it’s created and updated by Google. So if your team is looking to brainstorm ideas or check an existing plan against a huge database, the Bard app can be very useful due to its deep and constantly updated reservoir of data.
Google Bard is free to use.
Also see: ChatGPT vs. Google Bard: Generative AI Comparison
Socrates.ai icon.
Socrates.ai is an artificial intelligence platform that provides businesses with an array of conversational AI solutions. It enables companies to create and deploy conversational agents that can interact with users naturally, and is part of the wave of chatbots that is playing an ever greater role as a “first responder” to real time, in-bound consumer questions and concerns.
The Socrates app can be integrated into various channels, such as websites, mobile apps, and messaging platforms, to enhance user experience and support automation. Significantly, the app’s large library of pre-built and pre-tested content enables a company to efficiently – and constantly – query its internal knowledge base and use company-specific terminology in chatbot answers. This key feature makes Socrates ideal for organizations that need to frequently update chatbot responses based on fresh internal data.
Additionally, Socrates integrates with third-party enterprise apps, providing a far fuller range of features. It also facilitates bot to bot communication, which also helps this chatbot stay refreshed with more current information.
Available upon request.
Also see: Generative AI Companies: Top 12 Leaders
Hugging Face icon.
Developed by Hugging Face, HuggingChat is a chatbot based on the Open Assistant Conversational AI Model. It uses NLP and ML algorithms to interact with users and can generate answers to questions, write essays, write code, translate text, and construct emails. The platform has been trained on a large dataset of diverse conversations and can learn from new interactions.
Most significantly, Hugging Face has a large and enthusiastic following among developers – it’s something of a favorite in the development community. Its platform is set up as an ideal environment to mix and match chatbot elements, including datasets ranging from Berkeley’s Nectar to Wikipedia/Wikimedia. And the AI models available range from Anthropic to Playground AI.
Many of these resources may not mean much to the SMB owner or enterprise manager – but they mean a great deal to developers with the expertise to use a deep resource base to customize an AI chatbot. Given that HuggingChat offers such a rich developer-centric platform, users can expect it to grow rapidly as AI chatbots gain still more adoption.
HuggingChat is free to use. You can also subscribe to the Pro plan at $9 per month to get early access to new features. They also offer an Enterprise Hub plan at $20 per user per month.
Also see: Generative AI Startups
Jasper icon.
The Jasper generative AI chatbot can be trained on your brand voice to interact with your customers in a personalized manner. Jasper partners with OpenAI and uses GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 language models and their proprietary AI engine. The company also sources from other models such as Neo X, T5, and Bloom.
Clearly, Jasper’s strongest upside is its brand voice functionality, which allows teams and organizations to create highly specific, on-brand content. This capability is invaluable for marketing and sales team that need to ensure that all chatbot communications are created with an accurate brand identity.
Out of the box, Jasper offers more than 50 templates, so the user won’t need to create a chatbot persona from scratch. The wide array of models that Jasper accesses and its focus on customizing for brand identity means this is a choice that marketing teams should at least audition before they make any final selections for an AI chatbot.
Tidio icon.
SMBs looking for an easy-to-use AI chatbot to scale their support capacity may find Tidio to be a suitable solution. With Tidio Lyro, businesses can automate their customer support processes, reduce response times, and handle tasks such as answering frequently asked questions. You can use Tidio Lyro to answer customer inquiries, provide automated responses, and assist with basic analytics, allowing you to manage customer support efficiently.
Tidio fits the SMB market because it offers solid functionality at a reasonable price. SMBs are under pressure to offer basic customer service at a low cost; to address this, Tidio allows the creation of wide array of pre-written responses for simple questions that customers ask again and again. Most important in terms of tools and affordability, Tidio offers add-ons at no extra cost, including sales templates to save time with setup.
Additionally, the quality of Tidio’s output was ranked highly in our research, so even as the AI chatbot focuses on affordability, it offers a quality toolset.
ChatSpot icon.
ChatSpot combines the capabilities of ChatGPT and HubSpot CRM into one solution. With this tool, you can draft blog posts and tweets and also create AI-generated images. You can feed this app a prompt to enable you to get specific data from your HubSpot CRM.
ChatSpot allows you to perform many functions, including adding contacts and creating tasks and notes. You can also ask it to summarize your CRM data or generate a bar chart of results to understand your company’s performance.
If you’re a HubSpot customer, this chatbot app can be a useful choice, given that Hubspot offers so many ways to connect with third party tools – literally hundreds of business apps. And HubSpot, as its users are well aware, is a platform that offers great functionality for sales reps. This chatbot will likely remain a top candidate for sales and marketing professionals that need improved functionality for customer sales and service.
ChatSpot is a free tool.
Drift icon.
Drift’s AI is trained on 100M+ B2B sales and marketing conversations, enabling it to understand and respond to B2B customer inquiries in the conversational manner that’s expected in this market sector (including multi-language support).
The Drift AI chatbot is designed to handle different types of conversations, including lead nurturing, customer support, and sales assistance. It can engage with website visitors and provide relevant information or route inquiries to the appropriate human representative.
Drift can be custom-trained for your B2B business in fine detail, allowing it to learn your brand’s voice and respond in a manner similar to your in-house reps. The B2B market is a specific use case for AI chatbots, and Drift’s focus on this market means that a B2B company can set up a highly functional chatbot with far less work – and one that will evolve with the B2B market over time.
Ada icon.
Ada is an AI-powered customer service automation platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to automate customer service tasks. It is designed to help resolve customer issues, allowing businesses to streamline their customer service operations and enhance the customer experience.
There are two ways to use Ada. You can either connect it to your knowledge base and use generative AI to answer questions grounded in your existing content. Or you can build a hard-coded chatbot using Ada’s natural language understanding and its drag-and-drop platform for a pre-scripted easy and fast setup.
In either case, Ada enables you to monitor and measure your bot KPI metrics across digital and voice channels, such as automated resolution rate, average handle time, containment rate, CSAT, and handoff rate. It also offers predictive suggestions for answers, allowing the app to stay ahead of customer interactions. To its credit, Ada’s user interface is intuitive and easy to use, which creates a faster onboarding process for customer service reps.
Ada offers two pricing plans: Generative and Scripted. However, the vendor doesn’t advertise its plan rate – interested buyers must contact Ada’s sales team for a quote.
LivePerson icon.
With the LivePerson AI chatbot, you can simulate human-like conversation by interacting with users in a natural, conversational manner. Its goal is to discover customer intent – which is the core of most successful sales interactions – using analytics. To this end, LivePerson offers what it calls a “meaningful automated conversation score,” which is a metric that attempts to quantify whether a given bot-human interaction was successful in terms of company branding and service.
Additionally, the platform enables you to convert webpages, PDFs, and FAQs into interactive AI chatbot experiences that use natural human language to showcase your brand’s expertise. The bot’s entire strategy is based on making as much content as possible available in a conversational format.
LivePerson can be deployed on various digital channels, such as websites and messaging apps, to automate customer interactions, provide instant responses to inquiries, assist with transactions, and offer personalized recommendations. Significantly, LivePerson is also geared to be embedded in social media platforms, so it certainly aims to reach a large consumer base.
LivePerson offers two plans, which are Conversational Cloud and Conversational Cloud & Generative AI. But both plans are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. LivePerson says you will only pay for resolutions, not seats, chats, or minutes. The Conversational Cloud is ideal for businesses looking to “automate messages and calls, optimize consumer insights, increase agent productivity with LivePerson AI,” while the Conversational Cloud & Generative AI help organizations “accelerate automation, increase conversion rate, and boost agent productivity with Generative AI.”
Replika icon.
Replika is an artificial intelligence chatbot designed to have meaningful and empathetic conversations with users. Its focus is based more on entertaining and engaging personal interaction rather than straight forward business purposes.
To support its goal, Replika uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to understand and respond to text-based conversations. Replika aims to be a virtual friend or companion that learns from and adapts to the user’s personality and preferences.
To better engage, the platform learns a user’s texting style and mimics it. Of course this means that the longer a user interfaces with the app, the more accurately Replika can mimic a user’s style.
Its motto is “My AI Friend.” The app claims that it can offer dialogue geared for emotional support. To that end, it can engage in a wide variety topics, or even help users learn new things.
Intercom icon.
The Intercom AI chatbot aims to improve customer experience, automate support processes, and enhance user engagement. Its AI-powered chatbot, Fin, is powered by large language models from OpenAI. The fact that OpenAI (with all of its deep funding and vast expertise) provides Intercom’s underlying engine is clearly a plus.
Intercom can engage in realistic conversations with customers, helping to resolve common issues, answer questions, and initiate actions – in sum, it’s an app aimed clearly at the lucrative call center sector. So what distinguishes it? First, it has gained wide adoption in the industry, and is used by companies ranging from Amazon to Microsoft to Meta.
Also, it offers a “plug and play” chatbot architecture to make setup relatively easy. Particularly useful: Intercom’s “Composer AI” feature enables a call center rep to rephrase a message with one click, turning a single phrase into longer, more detailed response. It can easily summarize entire conversations with one click.
Offers a 14-day free trial.
Kommunicate icon.
Kommunicate is a generative AI-powered chatbot designed to help businesses optimize customer support and improve the customer experience. One of its chief goals is assisting and completing sales for e-commerce vendors, though it also handles support and the full range of customer queries.
The app provides automated conversational capabilities through chatbots, live chat, and omnichannel customer support. Kommunicate can be integrated into websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms, allowing businesses to engage with their customers in real time and provide instant assistance regarding any issue that involves a sale or service.
To assist with this, it is offers a FAQ bot to lessen the load of simple, repetitive customer queries. The app’s feature set is far more robust due to long list of integrations, from OpenAI to IBM Watson, from Zapier to Shopify. It enables easy, seamless hand-off from chatbot to a human operator for those interactions that call for it.
Offers a 30-day free trial.
Freshchat icon.
Freshchat is an AI-powered bot and live chat platform powered by Freddy AI. Like many products in this sector, Freshchat enables businesses to automate customer interactions through chatbots and offers live chat capabilities for real-time customer support. It allows companies to manage and streamline customer conversations across various channels, such as websites, and an array of integrated apps.
Freshchat provides features like customizable chat widgets, agent collaboration, customer context, and analytics to track chat performance and customer satisfaction.
What distinguishes Freshchat is that it enables sales and marketing, and even support, to not only reach customers, but to scale those interactions so that the expertise of each live company staffer can be used to converse with many customers. It does this using its unified agent workspace, which holds a full menu of past conversations, as well as responses from sales, marketing and support, which an agent can quickly and easily share with an interested customer.
Crisp icon.
Crisp Chatbot uses AI to understand user queries and provide relevant responses. It can handle basic inquiries, provide product information, schedule appointments, and collect customer feedback.
In a growing trend across the AI chatbot sector, the Crisp Chatbot can be customized to match a business’s branding and tone. This is increasingly important in crowded markets where a number of companies are seeking to create a distinct brand to cut through the clutter.
Freshchat can also be integrated with other systems like CRM or ticketing systems to provide a seamless customer experience – and to facilitate later sales. It has an “Escalation Policies” tool that enables greater control for reps to move a challenging call to the right channel.
Most interesting: the app has a “Freddy Insights” tool that provides key trends and insights that can be fed into a conversation at opportune moments to prompt a faster decision.
Crisp MagicReply sample view
Natural language processing is an very important feature of a generative AI chatbot. NLP enables the AI chatbot to understand and interpret casual conversational input from users, allowing them to have more human-like conversations. With NLP capabilities, generative AI chatbots can recognize context, intent, and entities within the conversation.
Context understanding is a chatbot’s ability to comprehend and retain context during conversations – this enables a more seamless and human-like conversation flow. A quality artificial intelligence chatbot can maintain context and remember previous interactions, providing more personalized and relevant responses based on the conversation history. This enables chatbots to provide more coherent and relevant replies.
When shopping for generative AI chatbot software, customization and personalization capabilities are important factors to consider, as they enable the tool to tailor responses based on user preferences and history. ChatGPT, for instance, allows businesses to train and fine-tune chatbots to align with their brand, industry-specific terminology, and user preferences.
An AI chatbot’s ability to communicate in multiple languages makes it appealing to global audiences. This functionality also allows the chatbot to translate text from one language to another.
Also see: Best Artificial Intelligence Software
The best generative AI chatbot for your company serves your business’s needs and balances quality service with moderately expensive – or lower cost – pricing, based on what works with your budget. Additionally, you’ll need to ensure it has all the necessary AI features you need for your operations, and that these features will be supported going forward.
Organizations in the Microsoft ecosystem may find Bing Chat Enterprise beneficial, as it works better on the Edge browser. ChatGPT does not cite its data sources, but it is one of the most versatile and creative AI chatbots. Google Bard cites data sources and provides up-to-date information, but its response time is sometimes slow. Chatsonic can generate AI images as part of the answer to your query.
What seems like positives to you may be negatives to another user and vice versa. The best tool for your business is unique to you – conduct your own research enough to fully understand the chatbot market. Then identify your overall AI goals, and shop for a chatbot tool that offers features and capabilities that meet your requirements.
We reviewed each AI chatbot pricing model and available plans, plus the availability of a free trial to test out the platform. Our research found that some platforms are completely free, while some offer both free and paid plans – a tool like Google Bard gives you access to all its features for free, ChatGPT has a free plan with access to GPT 3.5 capabilities, while GPT 4 requires a monthly subscription. On the other hand, Jasper is a paid chatbot offering a seven-day free trial.
Features carry the most weight (30%) in our evaluation process. We evaluated various capabilities offered by each generative AI software, including multi-language support, the ability to accept spoken word input, the programmability of the solution, the kind of users it is built for, and customization options.
We assessed each generative AI software’s user interface and overall user experience. This included evaluating the ease of installation, setup process, and navigation within the platform. A well-designed and intuitive interface with clear documentation, support materials and the AI chatbot response time contributed to a higher score in this category.
To determine the output quality generated by the AI chatbot software, we analyzed the accuracy of responses, coherence in conversation flow, and ability to understand and respond appropriately to user inputs. We selected our top solutions based on their ability to produce high-quality and contextually relevant responses consistently.
Our analysis also considered the level of support provided by the AI software provider. We assessed the availability and responsiveness of customer support, including customer service hours, email support, live chat support and knowledge base.
We answered the most commonly asked questions about AI chatbots below.
Key features to look for in AI chatbots include NLP capabilities, contextual understanding, multi-language support, pre-trained knowledge and conversation flow management. It is also important to look for a tool with a high accuracy rating, even if the questions asked are complex or open-ended.
AI chatbots are important to businesses because they enhance customer experience and provide various operational benefits such as improved customer experience, personalized experiences, cost reduction, and increased productivity. Most important: they provide customer service at a far lower cost.
AI chatbots can boost customer support by providing 24/7 support, answering common questions, and personalizing interaction based on customer preferences (for instance, multilingual AI chatbots can communicate in multiple languages, enabling businesses to assist customers from different regions).
Determining the “best” generative AI chatbot software can be subjective, as it largely depends on the business’s specific needs and objectives. Chatbot software is continuously evolving, and new chatbot entrants may offer innovative features and improvements over existing solutions. Therefore, the best chatbot for your business will vary based on factors such as industry, use case, budget, and desired features – and your own experience with AI. In short, there is no “one size fits all” chatbot solution.
Read next: 100+ Top AI Companies
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Jesse
https://playwithchatgtp.com