Five free alternatives to ChatGPT

The paid subscription alleviates this problem by giving you 24x7 access to the bot, even during peak times, but what if you don't want to pay? (Image Courtesy: Microsoft Bing)

OpenAI's ChatGPT started the AI revolution. The AI chatbot instantly grabbed headlines and made the field of Artificial Intelligence, one of the biggest industry commodities.

That popularity comes with a cost though, despite OpenAI's best efforts, the servers for the chatbot are often stormed with users, resulting in long queues as you wait your turn. The paid subscription alleviates this problem by giving you 24x7 access to the bot, even during peak times, but what if you don't want to pay?

Here are five of the best free alternatives to ChatGPT.

The obvious choice would be Microsoft's GPT-4-based Bing AI. Thanks to an agreement with OpenAI that grants the Redmond technology giant access to their Large Language Models (LLM), Bing AI is based on the same technology that makes ChatGPT tick.

The best part is that comes integrated with Bing's search engine, so you can use it to scour the web and find information. It also has multimodal capabilities, allowing it to use not only text but images and audio as methods of input.

It also has an integrated image generator, can display visual answers, and assist you in various tasks like planning trips.

It isn't fully released yet, but you can try out Google's take on what it calls the Search Generative Experience (SGE) for free.

Just head to the website, and sign in with your Google account. It offers all the generative features that ChatGPT and Bing have and supports strong coding and reasoning capabilities. It had a disastrous launch, but Google is slowly turning it around.

Trained on OpenAI's API, Perplexity AI is a minimalist chatbot that offers quick responses and a free trial for you to try out.

While it does have a pro subscription, the free version is quite generous and offers very few restrictions on how you use it. At its core, Perplexity is based on OpenAI's older GPT-3 model but has multimodal capabilities.

It cannot create images but can act as a web search engine, even citing all the sources that it found the information from.

How about an AI that is designed to sharpen your selling skills? Twain's main gimmick is that it is your communication assistant for outreach.

The idea is to feed it marketing drafts, office communication, customer communication or sales pitches, and it will help you improve them.

One of the chatbots that started it all, Replika AI, is built on the GPT-3 language model.

What makes it unique is a focus on relationships and companionship. The idea is that you create a Replika that is unique to you.

It learns your writing habits, phrasing and recognises context from previous conversations to continue them.

Since the focus is on conversation, you can chat with your Replika about virtually anything. If you opt for a pro membership, you can even have video chats with your AI.