WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’ T HAVE TO!
Roundup
ChatGPT Claude HuggingChat Microsoft Copilot Google Gemini
Michael
Reed
will be our go-to guy when AI takes over. We’ve seen him in action, making a printer work with CUPS.
AI chatbots
Imagine a digital companion who’s memorised the entire internet. That’s what AI chat offers, and Michael Reed takes a look at five alternatives.
HOW WE TESTED…
We spent some time with AI chat in our lives. Rather than relying on traditional web search, we decided to lean more heavily on these systems for day-to-day enquiries.
One problem that we ran into was that many areas of the different systems were somewhat similar in terms of their capability. For example, telling one of them to generate a poem about Linux produced equally good (or bad) examples.
In the same way, none of them produced noticeably better source code than the others. You could perhaps spot differences when you get to a more advanced level in this area, but you have to remember that there are dedicated AI code assistants that offer greater integration into a real programming workflow than these generalised systems do.
Again, all of the systems that feature camera input could do amazing things with image identification, but we didn’t give that its own section because the results were similar on different services.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the hot topic in technology these days, A and bit by bit, it’s becoming a part of our daily lives. AI chat is one of the most prominent and easily graspable applications for AI, and it has the potential to be incredibly useful.
It can answer questions in a more detailed and tailored fashion than a conventional web search, but beyond simple research, it can teach us new skills. Try asking one of the services about the best game programming languages for beginners. Then ask it to elaborate with some example code, and you’ll be amazed at what these AI chat systems can do.
AI chat services also give easy access to generative AI. That’s when the AI makes something of a creative nature when given prompts by the user. Poems, source code – it can take a stab at creating all sorts of written text. These systems also give access to image generation facilities, where the system attempts to create an image from a prompt (a set of specifications) you give it.
Some of these services have a paid-for option, but it’s the capability of the free accounts that we’ll be marking them on.
CREDIT: Thapana Onphalai / iStock / Getty Images Plus
General queries and responses
We kick off with the most important aspect of what these things do.
ChatGPT specialises in detailed multisectional explanations in reply to queries. If there’s something it doesn’t know, it can search online for up-to-date answers.
We asked each candidate to summarise the current UK cabinet. Microsoft Copilot produces bite-sized W responses with a chatty feel, often adding a question at the end to keep the conversation going. Unfortunately, it was out of date on UK politics and thought that Rishi Sunak was still the prime minister. The short responses may mean that you have to ask a second question to get more detail, but you might prefer a short response if you’re accessing from a mobile device.