Which AI assistant to open first

Checked: 2026-08. Access, free plans, and prices change. Check them again before you pay. This is not advertising or financial advice. Read the terms of any service before you use it.

Do not spend a week deciding which model is best. For the exercises in this book, any assistant on this page will do. Open one and take a real task all the way to a finished result. That will teach you more than any comparison article.

Start with one of these

All three run in a browser, work on a phone, and have a free entry level.

Service	What it does well
ChatGPT (OpenAI)	general writing, rewriting, and working a problem through step by step
Claude (Anthropic)	long documents and text where tone and voice matter
Gemini (Google)	everyday assistant work, with links into Google's own apps

Pick whichever one you can sign into today. At the start, the difference between them matters far less than the habit of finishing something with one of them.

Also worth knowing

You do not need these on day one. They become useful once you have a specific job.

Service	Why you might open it
DeepSeek	a capable free model, useful when you are running many drafts
Qwen (Alibaba)	an open model you can use in a browser or run on your own machine
Perplexity	search that shows its sources. Check those sources yourself
NotebookLM (Google)	turns documents you upload into a summary or an audio overview

Before you paste anything in

Assistants store what you send them, and the terms differ by service and by plan. Keep client data, medical records and contracts out of them. A simple test: if you would not email it to a stranger, do not paste it into a chat window.

If your employer has a policy on AI tools, read it before your first serious task. That conversation is much easier to have before something goes wrong.

Next: your first 15 minutes.

Version: 2026-08-12.