What exists and what each does.
CHAT ASSISTANTS
Conversational interfaces to language models. The most common way people use AI.
Writing, explaining, summarising, answering questions.
WRITING AND EDITING TOOLS
Specialised interfaces for drafting, editing and checking. Frequently built on the same underlying models with a focused interface.
IMAGE GENERATION
Producing images from text descriptions.
TRANSCRIPTION AND SPEECH
Converting speech to text and text to speech.
TRANSLATION
Between languages, with varying quality by language pair.
CODING ASSISTANTS
Integrated into development environments, suggesting and explaining code.
SEARCH AND RESEARCH TOOLS
Models with the ability to search and cite sources.
AGENTS
Systems taking multiple actions toward a goal.
AUTOMATION PLATFORMS
Connecting AI capability into workflows between other software.
WHAT MOST PEOPLE ACTUALLY NEED
One good chat assistant. Most other categories are specialisations of the same capability.
