The Top 10 AI-Powered Chatbots in 2024

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has significantly transformed how chatbots function. With technologies like natural language processing and machine learning models, AI-powered chatbots can identify context, patterns, and relationships to generate more meaningful responses.

Today, AI-powered chatbots have numerous use cases, including lead generation, customer support, appointment scheduling, information retrieval, and more. In the health care sector, chatbots can answer basic questions, direct patients to more resources, or connect them with health care practitioners.

As virtual assistants, chatbots can analyze individual behaviors, habits, and preferences and perform tasks like organizing schedules and setting alarms to deliver a personalized experience.

From Microsoft’s AI platform to Perplexity, we help you uncover the best AI chatbots of 2024. We also let you know how chatbots have evolved and how they can be integrated into business strategies.

Table of contents:

1. Microsoft’s AI Platform
2. OpenAI's ChatGPT
3. Apple's Conversational AI (Siri)
4. Amazon's Alexa
5. Google Bard
6. Meta AI
7. ChatSpot
8. Microsoft's Bing-powered Chatbot
9. Jasper Chat
10. Perplexity

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1. Microsoft’s AI Platform

Microsoft’s AI platform is a comprehensive framework, providing innovative AI solutions like machine learning and conversational AI for organizations and developers to help them incorporate artificial intelligence into their operations.

For example, Azure AI features an integrated development environment for building bots. Azure AI is also compatible with Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft's low-code platform, enabling individuals with little programming experience to create chatbots.

Features

• Easy-to-use interface. Microsoft’s low-code platform (Power Virtual Agents) makes it easier for developers to build, test, and deploy AI-driven chatbots.
• Centralized management. You can use Microsoft’s centralized control panel to manage various aspects of your chatbots.
• Multichannel experiences. Azure AI allows you to deploy bots on different platforms without writing extra code.
• Enhanced collaboration. Microsoft provides various tools enabling individuals to work together to build bots.

Price

• Azure AI charges $0.50 per 1,000 messages.

2. OpenAI's ChatGPT

Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is among the most popular AI-powered apps, delivering conversational experiences to users. It reached one million users five days after launch and has since then surpassed 100 million users.

Its ability to process and interpret user inputs in real time, identify context, and generate meaningful responses places it among the top AI-driven chatbots of 2023. ChatGPT can also adapt to changing user inputs and handle more complex interactions.

Features

• Natural language processing (NLP). ChatGPT uses NLP technology and machine learning models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4—behind the scenes—allowing it to analyze and process inputs and generate corresponding outputs.
• Multilingual support. ChatGPT can produce text outputs in multiple languages including English, Spanish, German and French.
• Creative offering. Though it can’t be compared to human creativity, ChatGPT can still generate poems, music lyrics, jokes, and stories.
• Sentiment analysis. ChatGPT can detect positive and negative sentiments from text.
• Personalized responses. If you tell ChatGPT what your preferred tone or brand content style is, it can adapt to these preferences and produce relevant outputs.

Price

• ChatGPT has a free version, but users can still upgrade to ChatGPT Plus for $20 per month to access a more advanced ML model: GPT-4.

3. Apple's Conversational AI (Siri)

Apple’s Siri is a conversational AI chatbot that listens to users’ voice commands, interprets them and performs actions based on these inputs. Siri can perform a wide variety of tasks, including playing music, setting timers, converting measurements, making calls and providing driving directions.

Features

• Voice recognition and interaction. Siri can respond to voice commands, enabling it to provide next level conversational experiences.
• Language translation. Siri can help translate words from one language to another.
• Navigation. Siri can connect to Apple Maps and provide directions to users.
• Voice dictation. With speech-to-text technology, Siri enables users to craft emails, messages or other content.
• Home automation. Siri can be paired with other Apple products to help users control their homes through voice commands.

Price

• Siri is available for free—but only for those with Apple devices.

4. Amazon's Alexa

Amazon Alexa is a virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence and components like natural language understanding (NLU), deep learning, and machine learning algorithms—which enables it to process and interpret human language and produce responses with a natural conversational flow. Alexa can perform different tasks, including playing music, answering questions, and setting alarms and reminders.

Features

• Smart home automation. Alexa is compatible with different sensors and devices, allowing users to control various aspects of their home using voice commands.
• Information retrieval. Alexa can provide information like news updates, sports results, weather forecasts, and traffic conditions.
• Contextual interpretation. Amazon’s Alexa can identify context and track previous user inputs, which enables it to provide more interactive conversational experiences.
• Language translation. Individuals can use Alexa to translate text in different languages.
• Guard mode. Alexa can listen for unusual sounds in the house and alert homeowners.

Price

• Alexa is available on supported Amazon products like Amazon Echo, which have varying prices.

5. Google’s Bard

Google’s Bard is powered by PaLM 2, a large language model that allows it to process user inputs and answer questions in a conversational way. It can generate creative content like musical lyrics, poems, fictional stories, blog posts, and code snippets. Google Bard is skilled at crawling the internet, which allows it to provide up-to-date information to queries.

Features

• Multilingual support. Google’s Bard supports about forty languages and offers translation.
• Image and video analysis. You can use Bard’s integration with Google Lens to give you a detailed description of an image or video.
• Voice support. Apart from text, individuals can use their voices to issue commands.
• Multiple integrations. Google Bard can be added to other popular apps like Google Docs, Gmail and Drive, thus helping users be more productive.

Price

• Google’s Bard is still in the experimental stage and currently available for free.

6. Meta AI

Meta AI (formerly Facebook Messenger) allows individuals and organizations to create chatbots to improve user engagement and interactions. Developers can set rules to guide how these bots reply to users or connect them to a knowledge base to handle more dynamic interactions. Meta AI also features a centralized dashboard, allowing businesses to track key metrics, including how users interact with the bot.

Features

• Open-source. Meta’s Llama 2, a large language model for chatbots, is open source, allowing individuals to use it for personal or commercial activities for free.
• Customization. Businesses can modify chatbots driven by MetaAI to suit their needs.
• Integrations. Meta AI can be added to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, knowledge bases, and other business systems, enabling chatbots to provide personalized conversational experiences.

Price

• Meta AI’s model, Llama 2 for chatbots, is free.

7. ChatSpot

ChatSpot’s AI-driven chatbot is mainly for sales and marketing teams looking to drive customer satisfaction and engagement. It’s based on ChatGPT and can accommodate different data sources, enabling organizations to deliver meaningful user responses.

Features

• Customized for business. ChatSpot provides various tools to boost engagement and monitor customer interactions.
• Analytics. ChatSpot analyzes data and provides crucial insight, allowing businesses to make informed choices.
• Prompt templates. ChatSpot provides a list of prompts individuals can use to generate meaningful responses.
• Content generation. Apart from chat features, users can also generate images, tweets, and blog posts.
• Marketing recommendations. ChatSpot can help marketing teams identify keywords and analyze competitor’s strategies.

Price

• ChatSpot is still in beta. You can try it for free.

8. Microsoft's Bing-powered Chatbot

Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 algorithm, Bing-powered Chatbot uses artificial intelligence to process user inputs and generate responses. Apart from text, Bing-powered Chatbot can also display images, allowing individuals to gather deeper insights from their inputs.

Features

• Contextual understanding. Bing-powered Chatbot can keep track of user intents and context and provide conversational experiences with a natural flow.
• Browser integration. It’s directly integrated in the Microsoft Edge browser, allowing individuals to get real-time answers to their queries without opening other third-party apps.
• Visual search. Users can upload images and ask questions about them.

Price

• Microsoft’s Bing-powered Chatbot is available for free.

9. Jasper Chat

Jasper Chat is a comprehensive AI platform that performs a variety of tasks, including generating content like blog and social media posts, providing answers to user prompts, and summarizing information.

Features

• Information base. Jasper Chat is trained on large datasets of videos, articles and forums, which allows it to process customer questions and provide useful responses.
• Easy-to-use interface. It features a simple user interface, allowing individuals to enter their inputs and access relevant responses easily.
• Customization. Jasper Chat can be trained further using data from CRM systems, enabling it to provide responses and content to match a specific brand.
• API. Businesses can use Jasper API to integrate chat functionality into their applications.

Price

Jasper Chat is available in the following pricing plans. (Discounts available for annual billing.)

• Creator for $39 per month
• Teams for $99 per month
• Business for a custom price quote

10. Perplexity

Perplexity is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning models like GPT-4 and Claude 2, enabling it to provide information on a wide variety of topics quickly. It can also analyze user inputs, preferences, and habits and provide a personalized experience.

Features

• Session storage. The My Threads feature allows users to store and retrieve their search queries and results at any time.
• Perplexity Discover. Perplexity summarizes news updates, the latest developments in various industries, and popular searches, helping users understand what’s happening around them.
• File upload. Users can upload documents on Perplexity and perform different actions, including summarizing information.
• AI profile. Users can enter personal details or business information on a separate profile page and generate personalized results.

Price

• Perplexity is available for free, but users also have the option to upgrade to the Pro plan for $20 per month.

Evolution of AI-powered chatbots

In the past, businesses relied on rule-based chatbots for customer support. These traditional chatbots used predefined answers to generate responses to customer queries. Such chatbots could analyze user inputs for certain keywords or phrases and refer to their database for an appropriate scripted response.

Though they provided some level of assistance, traditional chatbots were rigid and incapable of adapting to changing user inputs. They also had a limited contextual understanding, which allowed them to handle only simple interactions.

Incorporating artificial intelligence into chatbots enabled them to process and interpret user inputs much better. With natural language processing, deep learning, and machine learning algorithms, AI-powered chatbots can enhance user experiences by generating more relevant responses. These chatbots can also process new data and adapt to emerging situations, enabling them to manage complex interactions.

In the future, AI technology is expected to continue shaping customer experiences positively. Since AI tools are available 24/7, they can provide consistent customer support even when staff members take a break.

AI-powered virtual assistants will harness speech recognition, computer vision, and text-to-speech technologies to offer more use cases and perform more complex actions. However, this does not mean that AI is replacing human agents. AI will act as a complementary tool, helping employees be more creative and productive.

Implementing AI chatbots

Implementing artificial intelligence into your workplace can help streamline numerous business operations. Here are steps for integrating AI chatbots into your workflow successfully.

1. Have clear objectives. Knowing what you want to achieve can help you avoid distractions. It also enables you to identify relevant AI tools to accomplish your goals.
2. Assess your resources. Look at your existing business resources and determine if your needs and skills are compatible with new AI technologies.
3. Train your team. Employees require technical skills to get the best out of AI technologies. Assess your team’s expertise and conduct relevant training to help them work effectively with AI tools.
4. Identify use cases. Whether for customer support, e-commerce FAQ, task automation, or other purposes, you must determine how you intend to use AI chatbots to address business problems.
5. Formulate a data strategy. Though most AI chatbots are already trained on large datasets, you can customize them further using your business data. Determine the type of data you will use for training and how you will collect, validate, and store the data.
6. Pilot and test. Don’t delegate all your services to AI chatbots at once. Instead, test things out with smaller tasks and use the results to guide further implementation.
7. Deploy the AI chatbot. If the results from the pilot phases are satisfactory, you can proceed to deploy the AI chatbot to your website or mobile apps. Monitor how the chatbot performs during this phase and perform any required optimizations.

Work with top AI chatbot specialists today

AI-powered chatbots allow you to automate repetitive tasks, enhance efficiency and cut costs, boost customer engagement and satisfaction, and provide product recommendations. Advanced AI tools can also perform certain tasks faster and more accurately, giving you a competitive advantage over your rivals.

As powerful as they are, AI chatbots still can’t perform all business activities without intervention from live agents. AI technology is subject to errors, bugs and inaccuracies. As a result, you need a strong team with the right skills and knowledge to oversee operations. AI is not here to replace employees, but to help employees be more efficient and focus on more important tasks.

Upwork can connect you to qualified AI chatbot specialists to help you get the most out of AI technologies. Get started today.

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Prices are current at the time of writing and may change over time based on each service’s offerings.