If you have heard people talk about AI and you are not sure where to start, the good news is that the best tools are free. You do not need a paid plan, a technical background, or a specific device to try them. You need a browser and an hour. Here are five free AI tools every beginner should try, and how to actually use each one.
The Gist
- The five main AI tools worth trying first are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and NotebookLM
- Each one is best at a specific job, so knowing which to pick saves you a lot of time
- All five have real free versions with limits that are generous enough for most personal use
ChatGPT and Claude: The Two Big Chat Assistants
The two tools you will hear about most are ChatGPT, made by OpenAI, and Claude, made by Anthropic. Both are chat assistants. That means you type a question and they type an answer back, a bit like texting a very well-read friend.
ChatGPT is the one most people know. You can use it for free at chat.openai.com. It is broadly good at everything: brainstorming, writing emails, explaining ideas, giving you recipe ideas, helping you plan a trip. If you had to pick only one AI tool to try first, this is the one.
Claude, available at claude.ai, is the other big one and has a slightly different personality. It tends to write in a warmer, more thoughtful tone. A lot of people find it better for longer writing tasks, like a first draft of a letter, or reading a long article and summarizing it. It also handles nuance well when you want an honest answer instead of a corporate one.
The practical tip here is to try the same question on both. Open ChatGPT and Claude in two tabs, ask each one the same thing, and see whose answer you prefer. You will quickly develop a feel for which one you like for which kind of task. Most regular users end up with a favorite for chatting and use the other for specific things.
The free versions do have limits. If you use them heavily, you will hit a wall after a few hours and have to wait. That is fine for personal use. If you find yourself hitting the limit every day, it is a sign that the paid version might actually be worth it for you, and you can decide from there.
Gemini and Perplexity: When You Need Facts and Sources
Google’s chatbot is called Gemini, at gemini.google.com. If you already use Gmail, Google Docs, or Google Photos, this one is worth trying because it can connect to your Google apps and pull in what it knows about you. Gemini is also free for making images, which the other two chatbots on this list do not do for free.
The upside of Gemini is that it feels closer to your existing digital life. Ask it to help draft an email and it knows the person you are writing to if they are in your contacts. The trade-off is privacy. Gemini touches your inbox and photos only if you turn that on, but you should know that is what you are turning on.
The fourth tool on this list is Perplexity, at perplexity.ai. It is not a chatbot in the same way. It is more like Google search, but with an AI that reads the results for you and writes back a clean summary with clickable sources. When you need to check a fact, understand a topic, or research anything before making a decision, Perplexity is often faster and clearer than the three chatbots above.
The key thing about Perplexity is the sources. Every answer comes with links to the pages it used to build the response. That means you can verify, and you can dig deeper. This is a big deal because ChatGPT and Claude can sometimes sound very confident about things that are wrong. Perplexity makes that harder because you see where the information came from.
A good habit is to use Perplexity for anything factual and use ChatGPT or Claude for anything creative or personal. You would use Perplexity to check “what is the current interest rate on savings accounts in France” and you would use Claude to draft the email to your bank about switching. Two different jobs. And if you are worried about privacy while doing this, it is worth reading why the head of Signal warned that chatbots are not really your friends before you paste anything personal into them.
Keep learning on AI Noobies:
- Claude Sonnet 5 Now Free and Better for Agents
- AI Labs Ban Each Other’s Tools at Big Tech
- Gemini Draws You for Free: Nano Banana Hits US
NotebookLM: The Underrated Tool Almost Nobody Talks About
The last tool on this list is NotebookLM, at notebooklm.google.com. This one is made by Google, and even though it is completely free, most people have never heard of it. That is a shame because it is one of the most useful AI tools for anyone who has to read a lot or take notes.
NotebookLM lets you upload documents, PDFs, notes, articles, or paste in links, and then chat with all of that content as one. So if you are studying for an exam, you can drop your course notes in and ask it questions. If you are researching a big decision, you can upload every article you have read on the topic and ask it to summarize the arguments on both sides.
The feature that made NotebookLM famous is the audio summary. You give it your documents, click one button, and it generates a fake podcast conversation between two AI voices discussing the content. It sounds strange described in words, but it is genuinely useful when you want to review a topic while walking or driving.
Where the three chat assistants above are open-ended, NotebookLM is the opposite. It only answers based on what you put in. That makes it much more reliable for anything where you care about the source. It never invents things it did not read in your files, which is exactly what you want when you are learning or preparing. This kind of grounded tool matters more than most people think, especially now that 79 percent of US parents already use AI to help raise their kids, according to a recent Menlo Ventures report.
If you want to be strategic about picking which tool to try first, a good order is: start with ChatGPT to get a feel for what a chatbot can do. Try Claude for a longer writing task. Use Perplexity for the next question you would have googled. Then upload a document to NotebookLM and see what happens. Save Gemini for last, once you have a sense of your own comfort level with AI touching your Google apps.
The whole exercise takes an afternoon. At the end of it, you will have a better feel for what these tools do than 90 percent of people around you. And you will know which one to open the next time you have a question, a document to read, or an email to write. For context on how these chat tools shape what people actually read online, we also covered a study on why AI chatbots now handle 10 percent of news reading, which is a useful backdrop for anyone starting to trust these tools with real information.
Stay tuned on AI Noobies.
About the Author
