Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, powered by OpenAI GPT models. It combines chat, image generation, voice mode, and web search, with deep integration across Bing, Edge, Windows, and Microsoft 365.
AI Chatbot · 42 tools
Best AI Chatbot Tools (2026)
Compare AI chatbots for everyday help, customer support, website bots, character chat, and free plans — from general assistants to ChatGPT alternatives.
All AI Chatbot tools
Mistral AI is a European AI lab behind open-weight models like Mistral 7B and Mixtral and commercial models like Mistral Large. It offers Le Chat, a consumer assistant, and La Plateforme API for developers.
Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that combines real-time web search with LLM reasoning to deliver cited, up-to-date answers. Pro adds access to frontier models and advanced research modes.
What is an AI chatbot?
An AI chatbot is a program you talk to in plain language, powered by a large language model (LLM). It replies in context, remembers earlier turns, and can search the web, read documents you upload, or call other tools. They range from general assistants like ChatGPT and Claude to narrow bots embedded on a website to answer customer questions.
Core features to look for
- Natural multi-turn conversation with context across a session
- A capable model underneath (GPT, Claude, Gemini, or open-source)
- Memory of past messages, sometimes across chats
- Answers grounded on your own docs, site, or knowledge base
- Tool use: web search, code, image generation, API calls
- Deploys as a web app, mobile, embeddable widget, or API
Who uses AI chatbots, and how
01
General assistant chat
Draft text, ask questions, brainstorm, and learn with an everyday writing partner.
02
Customer support & website bots
Answer buyers instantly with a bot trained on your docs, and capture leads.
03
Character & companion chat
Talk to roleplay characters and companions for fun, practice, and creative writing.
04
Developer & coding help
Explain code, generate snippets, and debug inside your editor or terminal.
How does an AI chatbot work?
Most chatbots run on a large language model trained on huge amounts of text. Given your message and the earlier conversation, it predicts a helpful reply token by token. Bots that answer from your content add retrieval — pulling relevant passages from your documents first — and extras like web search or code execution are added as tools the model can call.