The most important AI tools, from the US, China & India

The most widely used AI assistant for everyday questions, drafting and brainstorming.

• Huge ecosystem of custom GPTs and plugins
• Voice, image and file understanding built in
• Great free tier for casual use

Thoughtful long-form writing, analysis and coding with a very large context window.

• Best-in-class for nuanced writing and reasoning
• Handles long documents and big codebases
• Strong at spreadsheets, research and coding

Google's assistant, deeply tied into Search, Android, Gmail and Workspace.

• Excellent multimodal (text, image, video) understanding
• Built into Google apps you already use
• Generous free access on mobile

Answers with live web sources and citations - research you can actually verify.

• Every answer is backed by cited sources
• Great for up-to-date research
• Focus modes for academic, finance and more

AI woven into Windows and Office - draft in Word, analyse in Excel, summarise in Outlook.

• Works right inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint & Teams
• Enterprise-grade data protection
• Free tier in Windows and the web

The autocomplete-on-steroids that suggests whole functions as you type.

• Works in VS Code, JetBrains and more
• Free tier for individual developers
• Chat and agent modes for bigger tasks

An AI-first code editor that understands your whole project, not just one file.

• Edits across your entire codebase
• Agent mode can build features end to end
• Free Hobby tier to try it

Still the gold standard for beautiful, artistic AI images.

• Unmatched aesthetic quality
• Powerful style and reference controls
• Active community for inspiration

Astonishingly realistic AI voices and voice cloning for videos and podcasts.

• Most natural-sounding AI speech available
• Clone a voice from a short sample
• Supports 30+ languages including Hindi

Text-to-video and powerful AI editing tools used by real film and ad studios.

• Generate video clips from text or images
• Pro-grade editing and motion tools
• Free tier with starter credits

Elon Musk's assistant with real-time access to posts on X and a casual tone.

• Live awareness of trending topics on X
• Fewer content restrictions than rivals
• Image generation included

The open model that shook the industry - frontier-level reasoning at a tiny cost.

• Top-tier maths, coding and reasoning
• Free to use on web and app
• Open weights and ultra-cheap API

Alibaba's powerful family of open models covering text, image, audio and video.

• Strong open-source models you can self-host
• Excellent multilingual support
• Free to use, permissive licensing

TikTok-maker ByteDance's assistant - one of China's most-used AI apps.

• Fast, friendly everyday assistant
• Very low API pricing at scale
• Deep integration with ByteDance apps

Famous for reading huge documents - analyse whole books and reports in one go.

• Extremely long context window
• Great for document and file analysis
• Free to use

Baidu's flagship assistant, tightly linked to China's biggest search engine.

• Strong Chinese-language performance
• Built-in image generation
• Free tier available

Tencent's model powering assistants, image and 3D generation across WeChat's ecosystem.

• Text, image and 3D generation
• Open-source variants available
• Free to use

A capable model family strong at coding and autonomous agent workflows.

• Solid coding and agent abilities
• Open models developers can build on
• Affordable API

Best known for Hailuo, one of the strongest and cheapest AI video generators.

• High-quality text-to-video (Hailuo)
• Realistic voice generation
• Free credits to start

India's own assistant, built to understand and speak many Indian languages.

• Strong support for Indian languages
• Made for Indian context and use-cases
• Free to use

India-first models and voice AI for building apps in Indian languages.

• Purpose-built for Indic languages and voice
• Open models for developers
• Backs India's sovereign AI push

Enterprise-grade Indian conversational AI used by large public and private services.

• Voice, video and text in 14+ Indian languages
• Trusted by big Indian enterprises
• On-premise / sovereign deployment

An Indian multilingual AI aimed at everyday users across dozens of Indian languages.

• Covers a very wide range of Indian languages
• Free consumer app
• Focus on education and healthcare use-cases