Free AI chatbots make it easy for users to find information by instantaneously responding to questions and requests—through text input, audio input, or both—without the need for human intervention or manual research.
Chatbot technology is now commonplace, found everywhere from smart speakers at home to consumer-facing instances of SMS, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to workplace messaging applications like Slack. The latest evolution of AI chatbots, often referred to as “intelligent virtual assistants” or “virtual agents,” can not only understand free-flowing conversation through the use of sophisticated language models but even automate relevant tasks.
Alongside well-known consumer-facing intelligent virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, virtual agents are also increasingly used in an enterprise context to assist customers and employees.
What are AI chatbots?
An AI chatbot is a piece of software that interacts with a human through written language. It is often embedded in web pages or other digital applications to answer customer inquiries without the need for human agents, thus providing affordable effortless customer service.
AI chatbots employ a variety of AI technologies, from machine learning that optimizes responses over time to natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) that accurately interprets user questions and matches them to specific intents. Deep learning capabilities allow AI chatbots to become more accurate over time, which in turn allows humans to interact with AI chatbots in a more natural, free-flowing way without being misunderstood.
Although the simplest type of chatbot, a scripted chatbot, works by providing answers to customer queries by following set rules, an AI chatbot operates slightly differently. An AI chatbot works by combining machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to understand user intent and respond to an inquiry in a more naturalistic manner.
In this sense, AI chatbots are certainly more useful for businesses in fast-moving industries where the kinds of questions posed by a customer are likely to change. An AI chatbot can use previous conversations, documentation from customer support reps, and any other relevant data to identify the language, context, and intent before providing a helpful response to a customer query – even if it doesn’t fit neatly into the pre-configured rules used by simpler bots.
Chatbots are frequently used in a wide variety of online situations, from customer service to sales. One of the best-known examples of Conversational AI delivered through chatbots includes e-commerce sites where bots allow customers to ask questions about a particular product and receive an instant response.
How do AI chatbots work?
The earliest chatbots were essentially interactive FAQ programs, programmed to reply to a limited set of common questions with pre-written answers. Unable to interpret natural language, they generally required users to select from simple keywords and phrases to move the conversation forward. Such rudimentary traditional chatbots are unable to process complex questions, nor answer simple questions that haven’t been predicted by developers.
Over time, chatbot algorithms became capable of more complex rules-based programming and even natural language processing, allowing customer queries to be expressed in a conversational way. This gave rise to a new type of chatbot, contextually aware and armed with machine learning to continuously optimize its ability to correctly process and predict queries through exposure to more and more human language.
Modern AI chatbots now use natural language understanding (NLU) to discern the meaning of open-ended user input, overcoming anything from typos to translation issues. Advanced AI tools then map that meaning to the specific “intent” the user wants the chatbot to act upon, and use conversational AI to formulate an appropriate response. These AI technologies leverage both machine learning and deep learning—different elements of AI, with some nuanced differences—to develop an increasingly granular knowledge base of questions and responses informed by user interactions.
This sophistication, drawing upon recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), has led to increased customer satisfaction and more versatile chatbot applications.
10 free AI chatbots for you to pick from
ChatGPT
ChatGPT went viral in late 2022/early 2023, attracting the attention of the entire world in a matter of days. The app is very simple to use: start a conversation by inputting your prompt at the bottom of the screen. As the output comes back, a new entry is created on the left-side menu, so you can keep all your threads separate and come back to them later.
If any of these is particularly interesting, you can share a link to it and show it to others (and they can start where you left off).
While GPT-3 is already impressive, GPT-4 is even better. It’s trained on a much larger dataset, making it even more flexible and more accurate with its writing output. It can even predict what happens next when given a still image.
ChatGPT added plugins to the bot, which means you can also use it to fetch data, run programs, and access third-party services. Natural language is the new no-code, and with Zapier’s ChatGPT plugin, you can search for data inside any of your connected apps and trigger workflows, all by chatting.
You can also do the opposite, building ChatGPT into your existing workflows. No matter where you are, you can use ChatGPT to summarize, generate replies, or anything else you can dream up.
Kommunicate
Kommunicate is one of the best AI-powered chatbots that can help you to automate conversations, enhance customer experience, and grow your business. It uses the best of Generative AI and human touch to provide better customer service.
The platform helps to build the best AI chatbots that can handle customer queries across various channels like messenger apps, websites, and more.
By leveraging the powerful AI and NLP capabilities, it answers various queries and routes the ones it can’t answer to the human agent.
Key features of Kommunicate:
- Multiple integrations to streamline workflow
- Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities
- Allows you to create and customize your own ‘Help Center’
- Tons of customization options to fine-tune the AI chatbot
Google Bard
Google has been in the AI race for a long time, with a set of AI features already implemented across its product lineup. After an epic hiccup during the initial product demo, Bard left behind the LaMDA model and now uses PaLM 2 to carry out your instructions.
Bard can connect to the internet to find sources (even offering a handy button that lets you “Google it” yourself), which is a huge selling point. The search results can even show images directly on the chat window. It also lets you edit your prompt after you’ve sent it and offers up to three drafts of each output, so you can pick the best one. It can keep track of your conversation history, and you can share your conversations with others.
When compared with ChatGPT, Bard feels more conversational and less oriented toward text commands.
Drift
Drift is one of the best free conversational AI chatbots, specially designed to level up B2B conversations. The advanced platform helps to personalize conversations at every stage of the buyer’s journey – which ultimately enhances the overall experience.
Drift has the ability to interpret queries, understand the behavior of customers analyze what they are looking for, and provide them with relevant answers. It can also collect data from every single customer interaction, which helps it to understand and connect with the buyers in a better way.
Key features of Drift:
- Multilingual support
- Supports various integrations
- Offers a customizable chat widget
- Prioritises data security
- Helps to build conversational ai chatbot
Jasper AI
Like ChatGPT, Jasper also uses natural language processing to generate human-like responses. Jasper even uses the same language model as ChatGPT, OpenAI’s GPT-3, which was created by the AI research company behind ChatGPT.
With Jasper, you can input a prompt for what you want to be written and it will write it for you, just like ChatGPT would. The major difference with Jasper is that it has an extensive amount of tools to produce better copy. It can check for grammar and plagiarism and write in over 50 different templates including blog posts, Twitter threads, video scripts, and more.
If you need to generate written copy every day for your business, Jasper is the tool for you.
Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI is a free AI chatbot that is connected to the internet, provides sources, and has a very enjoyable UI. As soon as you visit the site, using the chatbot is straightforward and simple. All you have to do is type your prompt into the Ask Anything box to get started.
Thanks to the extensive prompts it gives users to try, this is a great chatbot for experimenting with and flushing out ideas. For example, underneath the textbox, it has a “Popular Now” section where it includes the most popular prompts and news. All you have to do is click on them to learn more about the topic and chat about it. Additionally, Perplexity provides related topic questions you can click on to keep the conversation going.
If you don’t know exactly what you want to ask the chatbot but know you want to start chatting about something, you can start typing in the prompt box and autofill suggestions will populate underneath, making it easier to come up with an initial prompt.
Another perk is that there is an app for both iOS and Android, allowing you to also tinker with the chatbot while you’re on the go.
Chatfuel
Known for its intuitive drag-and-drop feature, this platform enables you to build the best AI chatbots within minutes for Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and website.
Chatfuel can help you build an incredible chatbot super quickly. Its standout feature is the myriad of integrations offered, ensuring a seamless user experience and streamlining your business operations.
Key features of Chatfuel:
- No-code AI chatbot builder
- Offers various integrations
- Supports multiple languages
- Super easy drag-and-drop interface
- Provides a free Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) template
In conclusion, Chatfuel can help you build an AI chatbot that can engage with your audience and enhance your service offerings.
HuggingChat
HuggingChat is a free open-source AI chatbot assembled by Hugging Face. It’s similar to ChatGPT in terms of user experience, it accepts instructions equally well, and it seems to be happier right from the get-go—at least judging from the number of “Sure thing!”, “Of course!”, and “Let me know if any of these spark interest and we can brainstorm further!” you get.
However, it has a number of cons, like the number of factual errors it delivers. It also sometimes stops generating output in the middle of a response, so keep your prompts short. Asking it to “continue” won’t work all the time: sometimes the model will stay on topic; other times it’ll go on a wild goose chase.
Despite these limitations, HuggingChat is a great chatbot to use. It’s something to compare ChatGPT to, revealing a bit about how these models take your inputs and calculate the outputs.
Chatsonic
Chatsonic is a dependable AI chatbot, especially If you need an AI chatbot that is up-to-date on current events. As it is supported by Google, it is aware of current news and can provide you answers and stories that relate to it, which ChatGPT can’t do since its database doesn’t go past 2021.
Chatsonic also includes footnotes with links to the sources so you can verify the information it is feeding out to you, another vast contrast from ChatGPT. Another major perk is that Chatsonic is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most advanced model.
Other cool features include voice dictation, which lets you speak prompts as you would with Alexa and AI image generation. If you want to try it, you get a convenient free trial for 2,500 words with no credit card required.
YouChat
YouChat also uses OpenAI’s GPT-3. With YouChat, you can input a prompt for what you want to be written and it will write it for you, just like ChatGPT would for free. The chatbot outputs an answer to anything you input including math, coding, translating, and writing prompts.
A huge pro for this chatbot is that, because it lacks popularity, you can hop on at any time and ask away. Another major pro is that this chatbot cites sources from Google, which ChatGPT does not because it doesn’t have internet access. For example, if you ask YouChat “What is soda?”, it will produce a conversational text response and cite sources from Google specifying where it pulled its information from.
The chatbot is just as functional, without annoying capacity blocks, and has no cost.
Benefits of using AI chatbots
Why are these free AI chatbots so crucial, and what makes them a must-have in your business arsenal?
1. Super cost-effective. AI chatbots deliver consistent, high-quality customer support, saving you from spending on staffing costs. And remember the special part? They can also be FREE!
2. Reduced response times. In the digital age, where clients demand real-time responses, chatbots come in as a savior. They can engage multiple customers simultaneously, reducing waiting times and providing enhanced customer experience.
3. Round-the-clock availability. Your customers might be scattered across different time zones or maybe even night owls. No worries – AI chatbots work 24/7, providing real-time assistance, and they never doze off on the job!
4. Constantly learning and improving. AI chatbots are not just smart; they’re sharp learners. Every interaction makes them smarter, meaning they only get better with time and use.
5. Scalable. Growing your business means interacting with a larger customer base. This is where an AI bot shines! They can accommodate increased customer interactions with ease, allowing your business to scale without significant additional costs.
So there you have it. A virtual powerhouse that stands by your side round-the-clock caters to multiple customer queries simultaneously, learns from every interaction, and eliminates human error, all while keeping costs low.
Recommended Articles
- AIOPS: What Is Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations?
- Best AI Website Builders For Fast Web Designs in 2024
- Customer Service AI: How It Works & Why You Need It
- SERVER MONITORING: Everything You Need To Know
- AUGMENTED ANALYTICS: What Is It & How Exactly Does it Work?
- Insider Threat: Definition, Types & Examples
References
