"Do you want to know what's real?"
Remember Agent Smith from The Matrix? Well, while we might not be dodging digital bullets or questioning our reality yet, we've got the next best thing: AI chatbots. Today's chatbots are the Agents Smith of customer service – intelligent, efficient, and always ready to help.
These digital assistants are the first step towards a world where technology seamlessly integrates into our lives, making everything from booking a hotel to troubleshooting car issues a breeze.
In this blog post, we’re diving into the Matrix of the best chatbot AI and finding the ones that can truly bend reality to your will. We will explore a list of AI chatbots worthy of your business so you can choose the best one for you.
Getting started: What is an AI chatbot?
Chat GPT was launched by the end of 2022 and for a long time, the bot was all people talked about. It composed song lyrics, spit out party ideas, and even excelled at basic coding. Since then, we’ve seen the market explode with countless new AI chatbots launching every other day.
So, what is chatbot AI? And how do they work?
Just as the name implies, these are bots that you can chat with. They use artificial intelligence, or Natural language processing (NLP) to be more specific, to understand what you are saying and give you a helpful answer.
Businesses use these chatbots for all kinds of jobs but a few most common are:
- Customer service: Answering FAQs, scheduling service appointments, and providing assistance information.
- Sales: Recommending products, offering personalised deals, assisting with purchases.
- Leads generation: Capturing leads, collecting data, and engaging with potential prospects.
- Marketing: Offering personalised engagement, resolving common issues, leads nurturing.
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14 best AI chatbot companies and tools
According to Gartner, the use of traditional search engines like Google is expected to drop by 25% by 2026 due to people preferring AI chatbots over them. Instead of searching through Google’s results, it is much more convenient to simply ask your query in Chat GPT.
And the best part?
Chat GPT is only the beginning. There are several more companies and tools out there offering all kinds of helpful features. And if you are looking for the most competent ones, we’ve rounded up a list of the best AI chatbot companies to help you narrow your search to 14.
1. Chat GPT – The most popular online chatbot
According to Consumer Reports, Chat GPT is the most used AI chatbot in the US. Almost 19% of Americans have used it in the past 3 months, while the shares for Bing and Bard are 6% and 4% respectively.
Open AI uses NLP for its conversational chatbot. It can write, edit, debug codes, and even solve complex mathematics equations. In the latest versions, you can upload an image and voice recordings, and generate digital art from text prompts using Dall-E.
Pros:
- Powerful writing abilities and image generation.
- Multilanguage capabilities
- Web browsing
Cons:
- Most advanced features may not be available to free users when at capacity
Best for:
The most popular uses for Chat GPT are as an alternative to search engines (35%), writing or editing tasks (23%), or brainstorming ideas for school assignments (17%).
2. Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) – Smart AI chatbot for conversations
Due to its growing popularity, Copilot by Microsoft has the coveted second spot in our list of best AI chatbot tools.
It is the best Chat GPT alternative available because of its similar features and capabilities. Copilot can generate text, and images, browse the internet, and link sources to the information it retrieved. You can input text, images, audio, and videos.
Pros:
- Easy and free to use
- Access to current events
- Runs on OpenAI’s LLM
Cons:
- The app is accessible only through Bing
Best for:
Microsoft Copilot is the best alternative to Chat GPT-4 Turbo.
3. Gemini (formerly Google Bard) – Best chatbot solution for Google users
If you are a dedicated Google user and are already familiar with its workplace, Gemini is the best AI chatbot tool for you.
Google Gemini holds a strong position in the AI chatbot arena, offering a robust platform for various tasks. It excels in understanding and responding to complex queries, making it a powerful tool for information-seeking and problem-solving. Gemini can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way.
Pros:
- Integrated with Google Search for accurate and up-to-date information
- Access to a vast knowledge base
- Strong language capabilities
- Available on multiple platforms (web, Android, iOS)
Cons:
- Potential for factual inaccuracies, although Google is working to address this
Best for:
As an alternative to the conventional Google search
4. Perplexity.ai – Best chatbot AI app
Perplexity uses Chat GPT’s writing and Claude’s image interpretation abilities to bring you the best of both worlds. The software comes with mobile apps for Android and iOS so you can keep your digital friend with you even when away from your desktop.
The bot is easy to use and comes with an amazing UI. It can expand your knowledge about any topic using the latest news events and happenings. The answers also include sources of information and explanatory images and graphics.
Pros:
- Knowledge library to save information
- Related questions for deeper exploration of topics
- Mobile apps
Cons:
- The GPT-4 version only available with a paid subscription
Best for:
Researching a topic with citations to sources
5. Claude – Best chatbot platform for visual input
Anthropic’s Claude is very similar to Chat GPT in its writing abilities but what sets it apart is its seamless image interpretation. It can quickly analyse images and use them according to your prompt. You can use it to convert pictures of handwritten notes into text files and save them digitally.
It also accepts documents and converts them to other file types. It also excels in providing summaries of factual topics or creating stories. It can also offer different perspectives on a variety of topics.
Claude is trained on data up to 2023 which makes it more up-to-date than Chat GPT’s knowledge bank.
Pros:
- Strong ability to read and analyse images
- Strong focus on safety and harmlessness
- Accepts documents as input
Cons:
- Not as widely accessible as its counterparts
- Has a limit to daily messages since it is in an open beta
Best for:
Claude is a valuable Chat GPT alternative for writing, editing, research, coding, and problem-solving when you use its paid version for unlimited usage.
6. Jasper Chat – Most advanced AI chatbot for writing
Jasper, formerly known as Jarvis.ai, is a powerful AI chatbot specifically designed to assist with content creation. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools and features that make it a valuable asset for writers, marketers, and businesses of all sizes.
Pros:
- Jasper offers a whopping 50+ pre-built templates covering a wide range of content types, from blog posts and social media captions to landing pages and email newsletters. This makes it easy to generate a variety of content quickly and efficiently.
- It goes beyond basic text generation with built-in features like plagiarism checking and copyediting. This ensures that your content is original, polished, and grammatically sound.
- Jasper can help you create content that's optimized for search engines, increasing your chances of ranking higher in search results.
- It can learn your brand voice and style, ensuring consistency across all your content.
Cons:
- Unlike some AI chatbots, Jasper doesn't have a free tier. You need a paid subscription to access its features.
- There's no free trial available, so you'll need to commit to a paid plan before experiencing Jasper's full capabilities.
Best for:
Jasper is a powerful AI chatbot that excels in content creation. Its diverse set of features and templates makes it ideal for anyone looking to streamline their writing process.
7. Intercom Fin – Smart AI chatbot for customer service agents
Intercom is a popular customer service platform that leverages artificial intelligence to assist buyers and provide a pleasant customer service experience. Like Trengo, the platform features an AI-powered bot that can help your agents save time by automating mundane tasks.
The bot is called Fin and offers a range of pros.
Pros:
- Fin automates repetitive tasks, freeing up human agents to focus on complex issues. This leads to increased productivity and faster response times.
- Fin can access and process information from various sources, including internal articles and help centres, providing accurate and relevant answers to customer inquiries.
- Intercom offers in-depth analytics to help you understand customer behaviour and optimise your support strategy using Fin.
- By analysing past interactions, Fin can provide tailored responses, enhancing the customer experience.
- The bot is easy to use, without any learning curve.
Cons:
- While Intercom offers a range of plans, the cost might be prohibitive for small businesses with limited budgets.
Best for:
Intercom is a powerful tool for businesses seeking to elevate their customer support game. By combining AI with human expertise, it can significantly improve customer satisfaction and efficiency.
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8. Kustomer – Best chatbot platform with CRM
If you are running a business, chances are you are already using a CRM. It is a software that lets you store, process, analyse, track, and utilise customer-related data for business operations.
Kustomer is one such software that also comes with an AI-powered chatbot appropriate to use as a costumer service agent. Being under the same roof as the CRM, gives the bot access to a wealth of customer knowledge.
Pros:
- Kustomer's AI chatbots offer instant, personalized support, resolving customer issues efficiently.
- By understanding the intent behind customer queries, Kustomer can direct users to the most appropriate resources, improving customer satisfaction.
- The platform seamlessly integrates CRM data, allowing for more informed and personalized interactions.
- Kustomer offers flexible options for building chatbot workflows, catering to specific business needs.
Cons:
- As a comprehensive platform, Kustomer might have a steeper learning curve compared to simpler chatbot solutions.
- Implementing Kustomer might involve significant upfront investment and ongoing expenses.
Best for:
Kustomer is well-suited for businesses seeking a robust customer service solution that leverages AI to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction. Its integration of CRM and chatbot functionalities makes it a powerful tool for managing customer interactions across various touchpoints.
9. Ada – Best AI chabot for customer service with personalisation
This AI agent can handle a wide range of customer service tasks for you due to its versatile data usage. The bot can leverage your business systems, communication platforms, and data analytics to provide the most accurate and hyper-personalised customer service answers.
Ada's builders and guidance features offer significant customisation options to tailor the chatbot to specific business needs.
Pros:
- Ada's ability to access various data sources allows it to provide contextually relevant and personalized responses.
- Ada's coverage of multiple communication channels ensures a consistent customer experience across different platforms.
- By automating routine tasks, Ada frees up human agents to handle more complex issues.
Cons:
- The platform's breadth of features might require a steep learning curve for implementation.
- Integrating APIs and configuring the platform might require technical expertise.
Best for:
Ada is a strong contender for businesses looking to build a sophisticated AI-powered customer service solution. Its focus on data integration and customisation makes it a versatile option.
10. Trengo’s AI HelpMate – Overall best AI chatbot for customer service
Finding a chatbot for customer service that is easy to use for your team and efficient at problem-solving for your customers can be a challenge. Most chatbots are either too complex for your team or too simple for maximum functionality.
And that’s exactly where Trengo shines!
Marvelling at the middle ground between advanced features and a shallow learning curve, the AI HelpMate can free up your team’s time by taking over most of the repetitive tasks.
And the best part? Trengo’s multichannel inbox! Not only can AI HelpMate help you with instant replies, but Trengo also helps you streamline your customer service operations by bringing all queries to a single inbox. So it’s almost impossible to let a query go unanswered!
Pros:
- Trengo's AI can immediately reply to customer inquiries, improving response times and customer satisfaction.
- AI HelpMate brings your emails, live chat, WhatsApp, and Facebook messages all under one roof.
- With support for 26 languages, Trengo can cater to a global customer base, ensuring effective communication.
- The platform fosters teamwork by allowing team members to collaborate on responses and knowledge base development.
- Trengo automates routine tasks like answering FAQs, freeing up human agents to handle complex issues.
- By integrating with a Help Center, Trengo empowers customers to find answers independently.
- The platform aligns responses with brand guidelines, maintaining a consistent customer experience.
- With features like suggested responses and @tagging, Trengo allows for adaptability and improvement.
Cons:
- If you want to use all functionalities you'll have to opt for a higher pricing plan.
Best for:
According to Webinar Care, 51% of companies use at least eight channels for their marketing efforts. And that’s what Trengo is best for.
The platform brings all your social media and contact channels to a single inbox from where you can send hyper-personalised, immediate, and accurate responses with the help of Trengo’s AI HelpMate.
11. Khanmigo – Most advanced AI chatbot for students
If you are a student and need a teacher while you are riding a subway or running an errand, Khanmigo has got your back!
Khan Academy’s Khanmigo is an AI-powered teaching assistant designed to revolutionise the learning experience. It goes beyond traditional tutoring by offering personalised support, engaging interactions, and a deep understanding of educational content.
You can expect comprehensive lessons for maths, history, and humanities, and even test your knowledge with practice tests. The bot even has a writing option where it helps with brainstorming ideas for your next essay.
Pros:
- Khanmigo adapts to each student's learning style and pace, providing tailored explanations and exercises.
- With access to Khan Academy's vast knowledge base, Khanmigo offers expert guidance across various subjects.
- By automating routine tasks like generating quizzes or providing feedback, Khanmigo helps teachers optimise their time.
- Khanmigo engages students through interactive quizzes, simulations, and real-world examples, making learning fun and effective.
- Khanmigo is available to students and teachers worldwide, promoting equal access to quality education.
Cons:
- While Khan Academy prioritises data privacy, concerns about student data security might arise.
Best for:
Khanmigo is more than just a chatbot; it's a powerful tool that has the potential to transform education by making learning more engaging, effective, and accessible for all.
12. Personal AI – Smart AI chatbot as your AI clone
Tired of generic, robotic content across the internet? It’s almost as if people have stopped writing themselves, right?
But how do you come up with content that sounds exactly like you but you don’t have to spend hours writing it? That's exactly what Personal AI does.
The chatbot can be trained to mimic your style, your quirks, and your knowledge base better than anyone. Based on a propriety AI model, Personal AI has an edge over Chat GPT in that it can be trained on your data. Messages, tweets, links, documents, you can feed the bot anything that helps it figure out your tone of voice.
Pros:
- By training on your unique data, Personal AI becomes a digital extension of you, capturing your voice and style.
- Automating tasks like email drafting and messaging saves you time and energy.
- As you use Personal AI, it learns and adapts, becoming even better at understanding and representing you.
- Your data remains yours, and you have full control over how Personal AI uses it.
Cons:
- The accuracy of Personal AI's output depends on the quality of the data it's trained on.
Best for:
By understanding and reflecting your unique personality, Personal AI is best for empowering you to communicate more effectively and efficiently.
13. Copy.ai – Most powerful AI chatbot for B2B operations
Remember Copy.ai? The content creation platform with all those catchy ad headlines and blog post intros? Well, they've done a switcheroo! Now, they're laser-focused on helping B2B sales teams conquer the go-to-market jungle.
But you can still use it for content creation since it retains most of its old templates to write great blog posts and email copy, the only difference is that now it can interact with your B2B database for incredibly personalised content.
It also helps with automating finding leads, qualifying them, and keeping track of the entire operation. All you need to do is provide it with the URL of your target company, and it will do the research and give you a report with everything you need to know about their business.
Pros:
- Copy.ai caters to both B2B sales teams with lead generation and content creators with its writing tools, making it a versatile platform.
- Automated features like web scraping and content generation save time and streamline workflows.
- Personalise the chatbot and generated content to ensure consistency with your brand's tone and style.
Cons:
- The quality of scraped information and generated content depends on the accuracy of the data on which it is based. It's crucial to review and refine outputs.
Best for:
For B2B sales teams, Copy.ai is a game-changer, and for content creators, it's a handy tool in the belt.
14. You.com – Best AI chatbot for websites surfing
You.com, previously known as YouChat, has undergone a significant transformation, shifting its focus from a simple search results page to a more interactive experience. You can ask it a question and the bot not only replies but also provides a list of relevant web search results on the right side.
What’s better is that at the bottom, you can get a set of helpful Reddit threads or other images or maps according to your topic.
Pros:
- You.com empowers users to prioritise information sources through its "Apps" feature, allowing them to personalise their research based on their preferences.
- It provides the unique ability to experiment with different AI models, each offering a slightly different perspective on your query.
- You.com is readily accessible with a free tier, making it a budget-friendly option.
- It cites the sources it utilises for its responses, fostering trust and enabling further research.
Cons:
- The screen can feel a little crowded if you’re habitual of the more neat Chat GPT.
Best for:
You.com’s ability to combine conversation, customisable search results, and various AI models makes it a compelling option for those seeking a more interactive way to gather information.
Which one of the above is the best AI chatbot company for you?
While the list of our 14 best AI chatbots is quite comprehensive, each of these bots has its own best features. You can use the table below to compare AI chatbots choose the best one for your specific requirements:
Features that make the best AI chatbot
So you’ve decided you need the best AI chatbot for your business. Great, how do you choose the right one?
With the market practically overflowing with options, it can be hard to pick one. But not when you have a checklist with all the necessary features.
Core functionalities
Natural Language Processing (NLP): Enables the chatbot to understand and respond to human language in a natural way.
Natural Language Understanding (NLU): Allows the chatbot to interpret the intent behind user queries and provide relevant responses.
Dialogue management: Manages conversation flow, ensuring smooth and coherent interactions.
Machine learning: Enables the chatbot to learn and improve over time based on user interactions.
Customer interaction features
FAQ management: Handles frequently asked questions efficiently.
Issue resolution: Provides solutions to common customer problems.
Order tracking: Enables customers to track order status.
Product information: Delivers detailed product information and recommendations.
Customer support escalation: Seamlessly transfers complex issues to human agents.
Sales and marketing features
Lead generation: Captures and qualifies leads.
Sales support: Assists sales teams with product information, pricing, and availability.
Marketing campaigns: Promotes products or services through targeted messaging.
Customer segmentation: Identifies customer segments for personalised interactions.
Analytics and insights
User analytics: Tracks user behaviour and preferences to optimise chatbot performance.
Conversation analysis: Analyses chatbot interactions to identify areas for improvement.
Performance metrics: Provides key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure chatbot effectiveness.
Additional features
Multilingual support: Enables communication in multiple languages.
Voice recognition: Allows users to interact with the chatbot through voice commands.
Integration capabilities: Connects with other business systems (CRM, ERP, etc.).
Personalisation: Tailors interactions based on user data and preferences.
Security and privacy: Protects user data and complies with relevant regulations.
By incorporating these features, businesses can create AI chatbots that deliver exceptional customer experiences, drive sales, and generate valuable insights.
What is the difference between an AI chatbot and an AI writer?
Have you ever had a conversation with Chat GPT? Maybe you asked it a few questions to help with your market research about a new product…
I bet the structured responses and helpful information made it feel as if talking with the most powerful AI chatbot.
But have you asked it to help with an article or write a poem? Does the bot feel more like a writer now?
The AI game has gotten powerful enough to blur the lines between AI chatbot and AI writer. But only a few years ago, these terms could not be interchangeably used.
An AI chatbot is specifically designed to have a human-like conversation. Its purpose is to assist, provide information, and solve queries. These bots can give out written responses, hence they need some writing capabilities but they are not advanced writers. Trengo’s AI HelpMate is one example.
On the other hand, an AI writer’s strength lies in its magic with the written word. Their basic purpose is content creation, helping with essays, articles, poems, scripts, and other writing forms. An example would be Copy.ai.
Implementing an AI chatbot for customer service? Here are a few tips
- Define clear objectives: Determine what you want the chatbot to achieve, such as handling FAQs, resolving issues, or generating leads.
- Create a comprehensive knowledge base: Provide the chatbot with accurate and up-to-date information to deliver helpful answers.
- Prioritise user experience: Ensure the chatbot's language and tone are friendly and approachable.
- Offer multiple channels: Make the chatbot accessible through various platforms (website, messaging apps, social media).
- Implement seamless handoff: Provide a smooth transition from chatbot to human agent when necessary.
- Continuously monitor and improve: Track chatbot performance, gather user feedback, and make necessary adjustments.
- Train your team: Equip your customer service team with the knowledge to support the chatbot and handle escalated issues.
Did you find the right AI chatbot for you?
A future with self-concious robots like in terminator may sound far-fetched, because even the best AI chatbots in 2024 have three things in common:
- They save time
- Minimise effort
- Are largely dependent on humans
Even if you employ the most advanced AI chatbot like Trengo for your customer support operations, you’ll still need a few people to supervise the bot. With a little human help, a chatbot will make your job easier and keep your customers happy with super-efficient service.
So are you ready to choose one from our list of AI chatbots and get your business super fast digital assistant? Check out Trengo’s AI HelpMate to start exploring your options.