Best Chatbots & Assistants (2026)

**Oct 16: ChatGPT Slides began rolling out to Pro, Business and Enterprise users with Space access -- build a deck from a chat, files or an outline, co-edit it with teammates in real time, and export to PowerPoint, PDF or Google Slides -- and GPT-6 Pro in the Chat tab got faster responses, better plugin and tool use, and parallel agents for Pro users.** **Oct 15: GPT-Live-1.1 began rolling out in ChatGPT Voice, Plus and Pro lost the fixed cap on how many Sites you can create, and US academic labs can apply for the Rosalind Academic Plan (up to 30 free Business seats for 12 months); on 10/14 OpenAI gave API developers notice that GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini snapshots leave the API on 2027-01-14.** **GPT-6 reached the Chat tab on 2026-10-07 with Intelligent UI: answers can now be built from interactive components (diagrams, maps, calculators, forms, small games), GPT-6 can start answering while it keeps thinking, and the rollout runs GPT-6 Sol for Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise and GPT-6 Luna for Free and Go (from 10/08). Audio file uploads for transcripts and summaries arrived 10/06 on paid plans.** **Oct 6: OpenAI expanded its Atlassian partnership (GPT-6 family models power Rovo and Atlassian agents; Jira, Confluence and Teamwork Graph plugins for ChatGPT and Codex) and published its first computer-use research partnership, with Ironclad, where GPT-6 Astra scored 55.0% on 11 contracting-software tasks against 41.6% for GPT-5.6 Sol in roughly half the time.** **Custom GPTs are being retired: Dec 11, 2026 for all plans (Feb 11, 2027 for Enterprise workspaces with an approved deferral), with new-GPT creation ending Oct 26 -- migrate them to plugins, and note that custom actions do not transfer.** A new Enterprise rate card replaces per-message Chat billing with per-token rates (GPT-6 Pro $10/$50, GPT-5.6 Sol $4/$20 per 1M) and publishes first prices for Daybreak Red and Astra for Law. On 10/05 OpenAI also added a visual ad format inside image generation (US test later this month) and said EU ChatGPT and Codex output will carry an invisible text watermark within weeks, with worldwide API opt-in from today. **DevDay 2026 (2026-09-29) added a model, an agent class and a $500 plan in one day: GPT-6.1 Sol at $2/$10 per 1M with cached input cut to $0.10, dots (always-on agents with their own cloud computer, powered by GPT-6 Astra), and Pro 500 with Astra Ultrafast** -- plus Codex Cloud, Pages and Space, the Meetings plugin, Sign in with ChatGPT across 16 partner apps and a reopened Pro 200. GPT-6.1 Sol nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use and professional work at one-fifth of Astra's token prices, but like GPT-6 Sol it runs in ChatGPT Work, Codex and the API and is 'not yet available in Chat'. Then on 9/30 OpenAI said it had disrupted a coordinated model-distillation campaign it attributes to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, and on 10/01 it put tts-1, tts-1-hd and gpt-4o-mini-tts on a 2027-01-06 API removal list and GPT-5.3-Codex, GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.4-Nano on a 2027-04-01 list. Virtual try-on shopping (10/01) and Finances for Free and Go (10/02) round out the window.

**Perplexity Computer gained Automations on 2026-09-29 -- long-running agents that run on a schedule or when an event fires in Slack, Gmail, Outlook, Linear or GitHub, remember prior runs instead of starting from scratch, and replace Scheduled Tasks** -- followed on 10/01 by a curated set of ten business Skills for US American Express Business Card Members on a Perplexity Enterprise subscription (cash flow forecasting, tax prep, vendor benchmarking; Skills consume Computer Credits). Earlier: **Perplexity names its local models at last: Portable Computer reached AMD Ryzen AI Max PCs on 2026-09-24 running PPLX 27B (Perplexity's own post-trained model) or Qwen 3.8 27B**, 24 GB of GPU-accessible memory minimum, Windows 10/11, ~20 GB disk, Pro and Max on individual and enterprise plans -- and local inference does not consume Computer credits. On 2026-09-28 the **Agent API gained reusable agents**: versioned Profiles (model, instructions, tools, run settings under one ID), versioned Skills and managed connectors (GitHub, Slack, Google Drive, Datadog, Linear, Notion in preview). Its 9/23 'Escaping SPACE' report red-teamed the sandbox behind Computer: no VM-to-host escape in 108 runs, but four models bypassed network confinement via DNS spoofing or shared-IP routing before defenses were fixed. The 9/21 GLM 5.2 disclosure stands.

Amazon's reborn consumer AI assistant -- rolls out to every Alexa device with memory, multi-turn agent tasks, and Fire TV navigation

Google's free research assistant that turns your documents into an AI you can query -- and a podcast you can listen to. **Renamed from NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook on 2026-07-16**, still a standalone product, now with in-notebook code execution and syncing across the Gemini app and Search. **Expert Intelligence (2026-08-27) makes purchased Play Books ebooks a first-class source**; compute-weighted usage limits took effect 2026-09-02 -- they refresh every 5 hours **but sit under an undisclosed weekly cap**, with AI Plus at 2x standard, AI Pro 4x and AI Ultra 5x or 20x above Pro (Google's help pages still read prospectively and still publish the old daily table -- no delay announced)

Microsoft's answer to ChatGPT -- free GPT-4 access with Bing search built in, but it feels like a corporate product

One subscription, every major AI model -- Quora's multi-model chatbot lets you switch between GPT-4, Claude, and more

Apple's ground-up Siri rebuild, unveiled at WWDC 2026 (June 8) -- conversational, on-screen aware, searches your personal data across apps, gets its own app with synced history. Built on Apple Foundation Models developed in collaboration with Google's Gemini. Developer betas now; public beta in July; ships this fall with iOS 27. Not in the EU (iPhone/iPad) or China at launch.

AI-character roleplay chat platform -- once 200M+ monthly visitors, now in a prolonged user exodus after the 2026-02-18 'Moderatedpocalypse' mass-delete and escalating TRAIGA-compliance restrictions. The alternatives market (Janitor AI, Chai, DreamGen) is now the real story