AI TOOLS
Some are even free
Kiall Hildred · Follow
Published in · 6 min read · Jan 19, 2024
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Key Value: Get fresh and free alternatives to ChatGPT and find an AI better-suited to your needs.
ChatGPT might be the most well-known AI tool out there, but it’s definitely not the only one, and perhaps not even the best for researchers
Here are 5 alternatives that can help you getting going and get done with your research.
Despite having the name of a grumpy old neighbour, Jasper is quite friendly, useful, integrated and international.
It can be integrated with a whole swathe of other tools and apps, like Google, Zapier and Grammarly, allowing it to properly act as an assistant, rather than just some chatbot you ask inane questions to in thehopes of gaining some of that all-elusive “productivity”.
In case you were unsure of its ChatGPT-competitor status, they make it clear themselves.
Many of these claims might be a little outdated now with the availability of GPTs, but the fact that Jasper is already integrated with so many other apps gives it a big advantage over ChatGPT.
On top of that, it’s just generally more user-friendly, suggesting prompts to guide you on how to use it.
You can train it on a brand voice, so you’re not getting wildly different characters each time you generate something, and it can also read 24 languages and pump out high-quality content in 31.
The Cost:
Jasper doesn’t have a free version, only a 7-day free trial.
And it’s unfortunately not cheap.
The Creator option is $49 per month ($39 per month if billed yearly), and it only allows for one user and one brand voice.
Perhaps not much if you’re doing alright for yourself as a sole trader or entrepreneur, but there are a lot of tools out there you might be shopping for and this isn’t the “everything” app just yet.
The Teams version is $125 per month ($99 per month for yearly), and only allows 3 users and 3 brand voices.
The Business option is unpriced — not like “if you need to ask, you can’t afford it”, just you have to talk to sales.
The name is less of an old grumpy neighbour, more of a 16th century French duke. And like a 16th century French duke it spends most of its time writing letters (or lettres).
Claude is a decent alternative for any writing tasks you might have delegated to ChatGPT.
Its motto is HHH: Helpful, Honest, Harmless. That’s something I think we can all strive for.
The Cost:
Claude has a “by token” pricing model.
So you pay a certain amount depending on how long your prompt is and a different amount depending on how long its response is.
By one calculation, 1000 tokens is about 750 words on average.
So it’s about $0.20 for a 10,000-word response to a 1000-word prompt. Or something like $0.05 on the Claude Instant model.
That’s pretty cheap.
If you’re at the “marketing and outreach” stage of your publication journey and you’re trying to figure out how to write something that’s catchy, coherent and perfectly calibrated for SEO, then Writesonic is what you want.
Writesonic does run on ChatGPT, so it’s hard to argue that it’s an alternative.
BUT, it is an alternative to having to fluff around with prompting to try and get ChatGPT to sound like a marketing guru and not just thebanal average of everything that’s ever been written on the internet.
The Cost:
The free version gives you 10,000 words per month. That’s a decent amount if you’re only writing posts on LinkedIn and Twitter.
(Look, it’s Twitter, OK. I’m sorry, but X is not a name, it’s a place-holder. Until they find an actual name for it, or the people born after the name-change get old enough to use it, then I’ll still be calling it Twitter.)
The paid versions start at $20 per month with unlimited words for individuals. $16 per month if billed yearly.
With the Small Team option you can switch on GPT-4 for some superior word quality and get up to 666,667 words (not sure why the 2/3rds of a million situation), or keep it on the soon-to-be-very-out-dated GPT-3.5 and get 4,000,000 words per month.
Either way, the Small Team pricing works on a sliding scale depending on the number of words and users you want, but it goes up to $499 per month for 5 users and those 4M or 2/3rds of a M words. Or $333 per month if billed yearly.
Not sure why the Small Team version would have a word limit and thecheaper version unlimited words, but I guess you’re trading off unlimited words for better quality words, longer-form, fact-checking, brand voices and better support.
Life is about compromise.
If you just want to freshen up some piece of writing, make it sound less like the soulless ramblings of a dead-eyed 3rd-year PhD who has lost all hope, then give SpinBot a spin.
It doesn’t write for you, it just rewrites whatever you paste into it. But that includes correcting the grammar and generally making your writing sound more alive.
You could even feed it some usually-quite-bland ChatGPT-generated content, just for fun.
The Cost:
There is none, it’s free.
Hate to break it to you Google, but calling Bard an “experiment” doesn’t get you off any kind of hook.
All AI is an experiment.
We’ve spoken about using Google Bard as a research assistant before, and because it works as a kind of enhanced version of regular old Google, research assistant is its most applicable role.
The Cost:
Also free.
I’ve decided to keep all my writing on medium free of paywalls. So if you like my writing and want to help me write more, you can buy me a coffee, subscribe, or hire me via Upwork or email: kiall.hildred@gmail.com
