Feature
The Gist
- Anthropic's Claude. Offers versatile conversational abilities and faster algorithm generation.
- Writesonic's ChatSonic. Provides personalized content creation, AI artwork generation and voice command capabilities.
- Character.AI customization. With a customizable AI chatbot marketers can create customer experiences with unique characters.
- Google's Bard. Powered by PaLM 2, excels in multistep problem-solving and language proficiency.
- Jasper AI interface. Jasper comes with marketing-focused templates and AI-powered content creation tools.
In the world of artificial intelligence, competition is robust, and innovation is ceaseless. As a trailblazer in the field of generative AI, OpenAI's ChatGPT has been a game-changer, revolutionizing how businesses approach both marketing and customer experience. Yet, several ambitious contenders have emerged on the scene, offering unique capabilities that present compelling alternatives for marketers and CX leaders who aim to thrive in an increasingly digital age.
Let's delve into five notable ChatGPT alternatives that have garnered attention for their distinctive approaches and contributions to the ever-evolving landscape of AI-powered conversational agents. Whether it's advanced natural language processing, specialized industry expertise or customizable interfaces, these alternatives showcase the diverse possibilities and provide marketers and CX leaders with an array of options to enhance their strategies and stay ahead in the competitive market.
Claude: The Brainchild of OpenAI Alums Revolutionizing Conversations, Content
As an AI startup, co-founded by former employees of OpenAI, Anthropic introduced Claude as a beta to the world on Mar 14, 2023, with two versions based on Anthropic's large language model (LLM) — the higher-performance model Claude and the less involved, lower-priced Claude Instant. A week later, the new Claude App for Slack was unveiled. A partnership with Scale was revealed in April and the following month Zoom announced it would embed Claude as an AI assistant into its platform within two applications, to support contact center agents in finding answers to customer queries and as a customer self-service tool.
With the ability to recall and condense complete Slack conversations, provide insights on website content and refine tasks, Claude is capable of supporting a range of functions, such as assisting with summarization, search, creative and collaborative writing, questions and coding. According to Anthropic, Claude produces more accurate and efficient algorithms and can generate high-quality training data up to 10 times faster than traditional methods, leading to significant time and cost savings.
Designed with a strong emphasis on safety and steerability, its creators say it is less likely to produce harmful outputs. Some users say it is more conversational, interactive and creative than ChatGPT and can handle a wide range of conversational and text processing tasks with high reliability and predictability. The ability to deliver detailed, easily understood responses that feel like natural conversation could be beneficial for customer engagement and user experience. Claude can also take direction on personality, tone and behavior, allowing marketers and CX leaders to customize their interactions with customers or audiences.
Vivian Shen, CEO of Juni Learning, said, “Claude provided better, richer answers for our students’ learning.”
Alex Alexakis, founder and CEO of PixelChefs said he also prefers Claude. Recently his company worked with a client who was launching a new product and used Claude to generate a series of blog posts explaining the product’s benefits and how it could help customers. Alexakis said the blog posts were a huge success and helped to generate a lot of interest in the product.
“I like Claude better because it's more comprehensive and can generate more creative content — for example, I've used Claude to write blog posts, create social media content, and even generate scripts for marketing videos,” Alexakis said. “I think Claude is a great tool for marketers and customer experience leaders. It can be used for a variety of tasks, including writing blog posts, generating email marketing campaigns, answering customer questions and much more. If you're looking for an alternative to ChatGPT, I highly recommend Google Claude. It's a powerful tool that can help you to improve your marketing and customer experience efforts.”
Claude is currently available in early access.
Related Article: Journey Through Time: How Chatbots Have Evolved Over the Decades
Meet ChatSonic: The AI-Powered Tool Advancing Personalized Content Creation and Customer Engagement
ChatSonic, launched by Writesonic, is emerging as a robust alternative to ChatGPT, particularly for marketers and customer experience (CX) professionals. At its core, ChatSonic is a conversational AI natural language processing (NLP) tool, powered by GPT-4 and drawing from a tight integration with Google Search. It’s often referred to as the “GPT with more superpowers.”
The AI is trained on extensive datasets, including customer service conversations and customer feedback, which are curated, refined and regularly updated. In a marketing context, ChatSonic is specifically designed and optimized for creating compelling, persuasive content that resonates with target audiences. In addition to its content creation prowess, it offers a user-friendly interface and customization options.
One of the key features of ChatSonic is its ability to generate AI artwork for social media posts and digital campaigns, offering a unique edge in visual marketing. In addition to this, the tool also supports voice commands, much like Siri or Google Assistant. ChatSonic can be customized with “Personality Avatars” to provide a personalized touch and act as a personal assistant for various tasks, ranging from solving math problems to preparing for an interview. The tool also provides digital marketers with innovative ways to reach their target audiences, including offering ideas and suggestions for trending marketing strategies and creating targeted campaigns. Some of ChatSonic's notable features include voice command capabilities, content generation on recent events, real-time data updates and AI image generation. It is a paid service.
“It offers robust features and a user-friendly interface, making it a preferred choice for marketers, CMOs, and customer experience leaders,” Jessica Bane, director of business operations at GoPromotional, said. “ChatSonic excels in personalized conversations by understanding context, intent and nuances of customer queries, leading to accurate and satisfying interactions.”
As a marketer, Bane said she finds it invaluable in creating conversational chatbots and virtual assistants, delivering personalized recommendations, addressing queries promptly, and providing a seamless conversational experience.
“Its advanced language capabilities and natural language understanding enhance customer experiences,” Bane said. “ChatSonic's analytics and reporting features provide insights into customer preferences, pain points, and trends, helping refine marketing strategies, optimize customer journeys, and improve satisfaction.”
ChatSonic offers a free trial for 10,000 words. Paid plans are available, including the Long-Form plan, offering up to 47,500 words for $12.67 per month. Enterprise plans for business start at $1,000 per month.
Jasper AI: The Marketing Whiz Outsmarting ChatGPT
Jasper AI, a startup backed by Y Combinator and led by CEO Dave Rogenmoser, is primarily aimed at marketers and copywriters. It leverages artificial intelligence to automate the process of content creation, offering a user-friendly interface that doesn’t require extensive coding expertise making Jasper AI an accessible tool for professionals who are looking to leverage the power of AI in their content creation efforts. Its language model has been specifically trained to produce marketing-style copy, and it comes equipped with a plethora of pre-built templates.
In terms of its offerings, Jasper AI is a comprehensive solution that allows users to generate both text and images. This is further complemented by a Chrome extension that allows users to utilize the tool across the web, a chatbot called Jasper Chat, and integrations with popular content editing tools. The product suite provides a complete AI-powered content creation ecosystem that includes built-in workflows, pre-trained templates and collaboration features. Further, it offers a custom brand voice, an instant marketing campaign generator, an image generator and a long-form editor, all tailored for marketing copy use cases and SEO support.
Integrating GPT 3.5, Jasper is not as conversationally inclined as ChatGPT when it comes to general use; however, while ChatGPT is designed to follow commands more fluidly, for more marketing-oriented content, Jasper AI tends to outperform due to its specialized training in writing marketing copy. Jasper AI does not offer a free plan and its pricing starts at $39 per month.
Oliver Goodwin, founder & CEO of Synthesys said Jasper is the AI tool his marketing team uses daily to help them create engaging content for multiple channels like ads, landing pages, emails and social media posts.
“One notable distinction that sets Jasper apart from ChatGPT is the ability to use established copywriting framework templates when generating copy,” Goodwin said. “By leveraging these templates, we can use proven frameworks that have shown success in generating compelling content. These templates serve as a helpful starting point, giving us guidance and inspiration to craft engaging and impactful messages.”
Raul Arantes, creative director at MediaMonks said Jasper offers dedicated templates and workflows tailored for specific purposes such as ads, social media, SEO and videos, adding, “It is friendly and straightforward — Also, the new campaign tool is versatile, automating asset and content creation.”
Vinnie Schneider, director of brand strategy & lead generation at Dovetail said his team has been experimenting with AI tools that allow them to automate some elements of our creative process, without removing the human touch.
“One such tool our team has been impressed by is Jasper.ai. Jasper allows us to quick brainstorm topics for blog posts or even outlines, generate a number of headlines for social or Google ads that conform to character counts, and even put together a rough draft of a landing page designed to convert,” Schneider said. “Because the whole experience takes place within a Microsoft Word-like editor, you are really collaborating with the AI and adding your own creativity onto the skeleton that Jasper helps you build.”
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Character.AI's Journey From Novelty to Necessity
Character.AI is a neural language model chatbot web application designed to generate human-like text responses and engage in contextual conversations. Created by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, previous founders of Google’s LaMDA, it offers the ability to create and train characters and the option to create their own avatars in Character.AI's text generator. Characters don't have to be notable figures, but they can be — like Barack Obama or even Elon Musk.
What started out as a novelty last November with fewer than 100 characters, users have now created more than 2.7 million. Given the ability to create and train characters, Character.AI could potentially be used for a variety of marketing and customer experience scenarios. For instance, marketers could create specific characters to engage with their target audience, or customer experience professionals could use it to simulate interactions with fictional characters or even real-life personalities, providing a unique and engaging experience for customers.
In March, Character.AI today announced it has closed a $150 million Series A fundraising round at a $1 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. Company officials said the funds would go toward expanding its engineering team, as well as its compute abilities resulting in a more sophisticated model with advanced reasoning and greater accuracy and delivering new features and capabilities to users.
The Character.AI mobile app is now available for download on iOS and Android and in March the company released an early preview of C1.2, “its new, smarter, more helpful model.” C1.2 brings new productivity capabilities and characters can now help draft emails, assist with test prep and brainstorm ideas.
Character.AI provides the tools for users to design their own AI sidekick, completely tailored with specific personalities and values. Catering to diverse individual needs, Character.AI can supply an empathetic listener or a logical troubleshooter. For users who prefer not to delve into full customization, Character.AI's burgeoning creator community has produced millions of ready-made AI characters for public use and interaction.
Gagan Saini, director of acquisitions at JiT Homebuyers, uses Character AI to handle customer experience tasks.
“Character AI is a natural language processing (NLP) platform that enables us to create conversational AI applications that can understand and respond to customer inquiries. It is an excellent alternative to ChatGPT, as it provides more accurate and natural language processing capabilities,” Saini said. “It also has a more intuitive user interface and is more customizable than ChatGPT. We use Character AI to provide customers with personalized experiences, such as providing personalized product recommendations and helping customers find the right home.”
Adam Willson, co-founder of Accelerate-Solar, said, in his view, the best alternative to ChatGPT is Character AI.
“It is a powerful conversational AI platform that provides natural language understanding, dialogue management, and powerful analytics. It is easy to use and it has a very intuitive user interface. It also has a wide range of features, including contextual understanding, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and more. Character AI has helped me to create more engaging customer experiences, by providing natural language understanding and dialogue management. It has also helped me to identify customer needs and preferences, by providing powerful analytics. I believe Character AI is the best alternative to ChatGPT, as it offers a more comprehensive suite of features and capabilities.”
Character.AI is free to use but a Plus membership is available for $9.99 per month that offers priority access to Character AI’s server, first shot at new features and faster response times.
Bard Bounces Back: Google's AI Chatbot Powers up With PaLM 2
As Google's answer to ChatGPT, Bard launched as a public beta on Feb. 8 during a live-streamed event that took place just a day after Microsoft held a surprise event with OpenAI, announcing deeper integration of AI features into the Bing search and Edge browser.
Initially powered by Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), during Google I/O 2023 it was announced that Bard is now fueled by Google's LLM, PaLM 2 — a more advanced version of the original PaLM, released in April 2022. During the event, Google CEO Sundar Pichai credited the joint work of the Brain Team and DeepMind for the advancements.
Equipped with 540 billion parameters and a novel "chain of thought prompting" technique, PaLM 2 can tackle multistep problems as a sequence of intermediate stages. Its training involved an extensive collection of public source code datasets, enabling it to excel in both common languages like Python and JavaScript, and specialized ones like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog. Further, PaLM 2's training on multilingual text spanning over 100 languages has significantly boosted its ability to understand, produce and translate intricate text. The model even achieved a "mastery" level in advanced language proficiency tests.
“When I want to know a prospect’s recent media highlights, Bard is my go-to. I also use it to write job descriptions, frame out blogs, draft work emails, and create social post captions,” said
Crissibeth Cooper, VP of marketing and sales at KNB Communications.
Kevin Groh, director of content marketing at Streamline Health said he’s had the opportunity to explore various AI chatbot technologies and while OpenAI's ChatGPT is undeniably impressive, he found Google's Bard to be a more fitting tool for his marketing needs.
“For instance, when planning our recent campaign on improving patient data management, Bard was instrumental. We asked it to compare market trends in healthcare data management, and it provided a comprehensive analysis, drawing from various online sources. This helped us understand our competitive landscape better and shape our campaign messaging,” Groh said. “Bard's ability to generate content ideas has also been invaluable. When we were brainstorming topics for our healthcare blog, we asked Bard for ideas based on the latest healthcare news and research. It suggested a piece on the role of AI in patient revenue cycle management, a topic that resonated well with our audience and positioned Streamline Health as a thought leader in the space.”
Groh said what sets Bard apart from the rest, is its integration with Google's vast ecosystem.
“This allows us to seamlessly incorporate Bard's capabilities into our existing workflows. For example, we've integrated Bard with our Google Workspace, enabling us to generate meeting notes, draft emails, and create content directly within our familiar tools,” Groh said. “While ChatGPT is a powerful tool, Google's Bard offers a unique set of capabilities and integrations that better align with our needs. As AI continues to evolve, it's crucial to choose the tool that best fits your organization's specific requirements and workflows.”
