By Joe Gladd. Part of MyEssayFeedback.ai's Critical AI Literacy series.
ChatGPT (chat.openai.com): Most widely used. Free and paid versions. Paid includes Code Interpreter for data analysis and file generation. Shareable conversation links for learning from others.
Bing Chat (bing.com, Microsoft Edge): GPT integrated with web browsing and multimedia. Sidebar lets users interact with any webpage or PDF — highlight, summarize, explain, expand, revise.
Google Bard (bard.google.com): Google's chatbot with browsing and multimedia capabilities.
Claude (claude.ai): Anthropic's LLM with one of the largest context windows for analyzing long documents.
Poe (poe.com): Quora's multi-chatbot platform — access ChatGPT, Claude, PaLM, and others.
Quillbot: Paraphraser popular with ELL/MLL students, now with co-writing capabilities. Browser and Word integration.
Grammarly / GrammarlyGO: Grammar checker now with contextually-aware AI writing assistance. More granular writing-focused controls than general chatbots.
Microsoft 365 Copilot and Google Docs AI: Generative AI spreading across Word, Docs, Gmail, Outlook, Sheets, Excel, Slides, PowerPoint. Notion AI for note-taking and content generation. Research: Elicit and Consensus for intuitive question-based academic search. Perplexity for AI-powered web search with source citations.
Start with ChatGPT for the most community support and shared conversations. Check your institution's existing tools. Remember: evaluating AI outputs is as important as generating them.