Nine AI Chatbots You Can Play With Right Now

If you believe in the multibillion-dollar valuations, the prognostications from some of tech's most notable figures, and the simple magic of getting a computer to do your job for you, then you might say we're at the start of the chatbot era. Last November, OpenAI released ChatGPT into the unsuspecting world: It became the fastest-growing consumer app in history and immediately seemed to reconfigure how people think of conversational programs. Chatbots have existed for decades, but they haven't seemed especially intelligent--nothing like the poetry-writing, email-summarizing machines that have sprouted up recently. OpenAI has defined the moment, but there are plenty of competitors, including major players such as Google and Meta and lesser-known start-ups such as Anthropic. This cheat sheet tracks some of the most notable chatbot contenders through a few metrics: Can you actually use them? Do they contain glaring flaws?