There are currently 4 main AI (artificial intelligence) chatbots available for free, running in any browser. Some also have free apps for your smartphone. They are extremely intelligent, geared to answer any question for which the answer is somewhere on the Internet or in a book or magazine. Here’s a brief description of the 4 main chatbots and how to use them:
- ChatGPT (the original) – https://chat.openai.com
- Gemini (from Google, formerly Bard) – https://gemini.google.com/chat/
- Claude (from Anthropic, best for long conversations) – https://claude.ai/chats
- Copilot (from Microsoft, formerly Bing chat) – https://copilot.microsoft.com/
ChatGPT also has a free smartphone app that is really handy to use, but of course you can access them all via your smartphone’s browser.
You can just ask any question you want an answer to. For example the chatbots suggest:
- Explain why popcorn pops
- Help me plan a trip
- Suggest some fun activities
- Compare marketing strategies
- Give me ideas for what to do with what’s in this image (you can upload images to most chatbots)
- Create a travel itinerary for a city
- Help me write a refund email for a product that’s damaged (or any other kind of verbal content)
- Create an image and bedtime story
- Write the outline of a book report to help me get started
- Help me learn a new language by quizzing me
- … And just about anything else that you’re wondering about.
If you have a complex issue you are struggling with, and don’t know how to put all that into a question, you can start with (for example) “I need help figuring out how to move across country. What information do you need to help me with that?” And it will give you a very stimulating list of questions which you can answer to jump-start the conversation.
It used to be (way back in 2023, OMG) ChatGPT was the only one that could carry on a decent conversation, or write something that sounded literate. But more recently Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard) has gotten quite good at this, and just this week an AI chatbot called Claude leapfrogged both of them. Microsoft’s CoPilot is especially good at providing footnotes to let you know the sources of its primary answers to your questions.
So now when I am dealing with any complex problem like writing a book, I use all 4 AI chat tools simultaneously, with a tab for each in my browser. It’s like having a conversation with 4 different advisors and getting a more rounded picture than just relying on one.
I encourage you to give all 4 a spin and get comfortable with them. This is the dawn of the new age of AI. Just like it took lots of people a while to figure out they really needed an iPhone or Android phone, and now we use them all the time, so will it be for AI chatbots. The sooner you get comfortable with them, the better.
I used ChatGPT a whole lot initially because it was the only one that could carry on a conversation of book length. I would ask it to suggest chapter topics for a book, then ask it to write 2000 words on each topic. But after a while I became aware of the fact that it used the same phrases over and over – such as tapestry (and threads), beacon of hope, foster, and journey. Of course I have been writing self-help books, so those phrases were relevant, it’s just that they were way too repetitious.
Recently Gemini has gotten much better at long conversations, and has a peppier way of speaking, plus it has live access to everything on Google, so I am using it much more often.
Claude has a great personality and is good for long conversations (chats), but cannot process something as long as a book. At least not for me.
Copilot actually runs on the ChatGPT engine, but often produces different results. One thing I like about it is that it provides footnotes for all its main points, so you can scroll down and click on the source links and go to the source of the information. That is comforting when dealing with complex topics and you want to be sure where the information came from.
Hope this encourages you to become familiar with chatbots and to use them for a better life. Happy to answer any questions if you want to leave a message in the comment section below.