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4.5: Which AI tools should I consider?

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    I find that a lot of people who haven’t used AI much feel some anxiety about figuring out what to use. Choosing can be pretty simple. You don’t have to read this whole article if you just want a starting place; you can just read the beginning and stick with the primary chatbots. Beyond those, I’ve included informal recommendations based on what I use and what I can imagine being useful for students.

    Remember all the cautions around privacy, bias, energy use, and more described earlier as you consider whether and how to use these systems.

    Try at least one of the three main chatbots

    There are a lot of apps out there, but they are unlikely to give better results than the chatbots from the three leading AI companies. So don’t assume you’re missing out if your friend is using an app you’ve never heard of that keeps advertising to you on YouTube. Many, perhaps most other AI apps use the same underlying technology from those same companies but with a different focus or user interface.

    Since we can talk to these systems about what we want from them, general chatbots can often produce good results for many different kinds of tasks; you won’t need a specialized app. In the process of using a general chatbot, you’ll get a lot of practice with prompting.

    The three most powerful chatbots have similar user interfaces and accessible free versions:

    Choose which model your chatbot runs

    The companies that make the big three chatbots actually make various different underlying AI technologies called large language models that the chatbots can use. The quality you get from a chatbot completely depends on which model it is running. To save money, companies don’t often set chatbots to default to the most sophisticated underlying models. So take a moment to see which model it’s using. Often, you can select a more sophisticated model without upgrading your account. For example, in the screenshot below, the user has selected o3 instead of the default GPT 4o. OpenAI’s o3 and Claude Opus 4 are examples of so-called “reasoning models,” a newer type that has undergone extra training for complex reasoning tasks and also spends more time trying to work through a request step by step.

    Screenshot of ChatGPT model selection interface showing GPT-4o described as 'Great for most tasks', o3 with 'Uses advanced reasoning' and a checkmark indicating it's currently selected, o4-mini described as 'Fastest at advanced reasoning', and o4-mini-high noted as 'Great at coding and visual reasoning'. There's also a 'More models' option with an arrow to expand additional choices.
    Screenshot of the ChatGPT model selection interface as of July 2, 2025

    Other AI apps you may want to explore

    I use the systems below in my own work at times. They are (mainly) based on the same underlying models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, but offer a different user interface.

    • AI apps for writing or studying with voice and audio

    We think differently when we listen and talk out loud than when we read and write. You might want to experiment with interacting with AI through audio or with using AI to help you switch between talking and writing.

    ChatGPT and Gemini are said to have the best voice modes; Claude has just added voice mode as well. I sometimes talk aloud with ChatGPT while exercising or doing chores. I find it useful as a thought partner that can browse the internet and help me explore an idea while I’m moving my body instead of sitting in front of a screen.

    If you want to listen to a text instead of reading it, the Microsoft Edge browser has a pretty good built-in Read Aloud feature that lets you listen to web content in a variety of synthetic voices.

    • To dictate my writing, I use the following:

    If I’m dictating into Notes or Otter, I will often copy the transcript into a chatbot and say “Please format this transcript and clean up errors without changing the wording.”

    AI for academic research assistance

    See also Pros and cons of AI for research assistance.

    Custom chatbots for education

    A custom chatbot is just a chatbot with an extra prompt behind the scenes shaping how it responds. Here are just a few that I use or have developed.

    Commonly recommended AI apps for education

    I don’t have direct experience with the systems below, but I know people who’ve had good experiences.

    Other AI apps you may wonder about

    I don’t have direct experience with the systems below, and I haven’t heard the educators and AI experts I follow on social media recommending them.

    Further resources

    This page titled 4.5: Which AI tools should I consider? is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Anna Mills (ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative) .