8 best AI assistants you can use today

Feeling like you’re constantly juggling tasks? In today’s busy world, staying on top of everything can feel pretty impossible sometimes. That’s where AI assistants come into the picture. Think of them as your digital teammates, ready to jump on repetitive jobs, dig up info fast, and help you free up your brainpower for the stuff that really matters. They’re popping up everywhere, from your phone to your work tools, promising to make life smoother and give your productivity a serious boost.

But with so many options out there, how do you actually figure out which one is the right fit for you? We’re here to help you sort through the noise. This post will walk you through what makes an AI assistant truly helpful and point out some of the best ones available today, covering different needs and ways you might use them.

What makes an AI assistant “Best”?

Picking the right AI assistant isn’t just about grabbing the one with the most buzz. It’s about finding a tool that genuinely helps you get things done. We looked at a few key things when we put together our list.

The best AI assistants aren’t just smart, they’re practical. They need to handle tasks accurately and reliably, understand what you need without a lot of back-and-forth, and ideally, work nicely with the tools you already use every day. Getting good value for your money matters too – you want something that gives you real benefits without costing a fortune, especially as you need it for more things. And, of course, what they can actually do should line up with the jobs you need help with, whether that’s handling emails, managing your calendar, or automating how you talk to customers.

Here are some criteria we considered:

• Accuracy and reliability in handling tasks
• Ability to understand user needs without extensive input
• Compatibility and integration with existing tools
• Value for money and scalability
• Functionality matching specific tasks (e.g., email, scheduling, customer support)

Top 8 best AI assistants you can use today

Ready to check out some of the top contenders? These AI assistants cover a whole bunch of different functions, all designed to help you streamline your work, manage your time better, and generally make your day a little less crazy. Some are built for lots of different uses, while others are super focused on specific areas like writing or helping customers.

Here are some of the best AI assistants you can start using today.

1. eesel AI

eesel AI is a powerful platform built specifically to plug into your existing helpdesk and knowledge systems. Its goal? To automate and make customer support and finding internal knowledge way smoother. It actually offers both an AI Agent to automate tasks on its own and an AI Assistant (sometimes called a Copilot) to lend a hand to your human agents.

This tool really shines when it comes to handling customer support tickets. Its AI Agent can automatically take care of those common, repetitive Tier 1 tickets. It’s smart enough to figure out what incoming requests are about and even do custom things like grabbing data from platforms like Shopify or your internal systems using API calls. For your human agents, the AI Assistant is a lifesaver. It can draft replies quickly and pull up information fast from all sorts of places – like past tickets, internal documents, and external wikis.

One of the biggest perks of eesel AI is that it’s pretty cost-effective. It works on a pay-per-interaction model, which means you don’t get hit with those high per-agent fees that can really add up as your team grows. Plus, it learns from your specific data, including all your past tickets and documents from places like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Confluence, Notion, and Google Docs. This makes its answers super relevant and accurate for your business. It’s also incredibly flexible, letting you set the AI’s tone and exactly what actions it can take.

eesel AI is a great fit for businesses looking for smart, scalable automation for their support operations without the hefty price tag you often see with the AI add-ons from native helpdesk platforms.

2. Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant built right into the Microsoft 365 suite. We’re talking popular apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It’s designed to give your productivity a boost specifically when you’re working within these tools.

Copilot can help you draft emails, give you quick summaries of long documents or meeting chats in Teams, help you analyze data in Excel, and even pitch in with creating presentations in PowerPoint. It uses the context of the Microsoft app you’re using to give you helpful suggestions and finish tasks.

This assistant is awesome for folks and teams who spend most of their work life inside the Microsoft 365 world. Its strength is how smoothly it fits within those apps, making things like writing content and looking at data faster. However, it mostly sticks to the Microsoft environment, which might be a downside if you use a lot of tools outside of Microsoft.

3. Google Assistant

Google Assistant is an AI assistant you’ll find pretty much everywhere – on smartphones, smart speakers, smart displays, and other gadgets. It’s really well-known for being good at handling general tasks and finding information.

You can ask Google Assistant to set reminders, manage your calendar, get live updates on the weather or traffic, answer questions using Google’s massive knowledge base, and control your compatible smart home devices. It works seamlessly with other Google services like Gmail and Calendar.

Google Assistant is perfect for users who are already using lots of Google products and want a hands-free way to manage their day or quickly get information. Its big strength is having access to Google’s vast knowledge and working really well with voice commands across many devices. That said, its work-specific productivity features might not be as advanced as tools built just for the workplace, especially outside of Google Workspace.

4. Notion AI

Notion AI is an AI assistant built directly into the Notion workspace itself. If you use Notion for taking notes, managing projects, writing documentation, or building internal wikis, this AI can be a really handy addition.

It’s integrated right into your pages and databases, helping you write, summarize, brainstorm ideas, translate text, and make your writing sound better, all without leaving your content. You can ask it to whip up blog posts, meeting agendas, marketing copy, or summarize long documents you’ve got stored in Notion.

This assistant is ideal for individuals and teams who rely heavily on Notion as their main spot for organizing information and handling projects. Its strength is how tightly it works with your existing Notion content, letting it help you write and edit based on context. However, it only works within the Notion platform; it won’t help you with tasks or content outside of Notion.

5. Grammarly

Grammarly is a popular AI writing assistant that focuses specifically on making your text better and more effective. It does way more than just basic spell-checking to help you communicate more clearly and professionally.

Its main features include checking for grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes, suggesting ways to make your writing clearer and more concise, analyzing how your writing sounds (the tone), and even checking for plagiarism by comparing your text against billions of web pages. It works across lots of different platforms and apps, including browsers, email programs, and document editors.

Grammarly is great for anyone who writes a lot for work or personal stuff and wants to make sure their communication is polished and free of errors. Its strength is how well it can refine text and give you feedback on your writing style and tone right away. While super useful for writing, it’s not a general helper and won’t assist with things like scheduling, analyzing data, or other tasks that aren’t about writing.

6. Krisp

Krisp is an AI-powered tool best known for getting rid of background noise, but it also has features that make it a helpful meeting assistant, making your virtual calls more productive.

Besides zapping background noise and echo from your calls, Krisp’s meeting assistant can give you real-time transcripts of what everyone is saying. After the meeting, it can even generate summaries and list out action items, saving you the headache of taking detailed notes yourself.

This tool is awesome for professionals who spend a lot of time in virtual meetings and get distracted easily or hate having to write down everything manually. Its strength is making audio clearer and automating meeting notes. While really valuable for meetings, its features are mostly limited to that context; it doesn’t offer broader task management or content creation help.

7. Lindy AI

Lindy AI is a platform that lets you build highly customized AI assistants specifically for your workflows. Instead of just one assistant, you can create multiple “Lindies” for different jobs you need done.

Lindy’s platform lets you automate tasks like scheduling meetings by finding the best times for everyone involved. You can build agents to manage your email, do research by scanning the internet, transcribe audio, or even handle phone calls using AI voices that sound pretty realistic. It connects with other tools too, so you can link things up.

This platform is perfect for users who have specific, often complicated, workflows they want to automate and can’t find a ready-made assistant to handle it. Its strength is how flexible it is, letting you create custom agents that can do multiple tasks. However, it does need a bit more setting up and configuring compared to assistants you can just start using right away, since you have to design and build the workflow for each agent.

8. Zapier

Zapier is widely known as a tool for automating connections between different web applications. While it’s not a chatty AI assistant in the usual sense, its growing AI features let it act as a powerful workflow assistant.

Zapier lets you automate repetitive tasks by creating “Zaps.” These are triggers in one app that cause actions in another. For instance, you can automatically save email attachments to cloud storage or add new form submissions to a spreadsheet. Its newer AI features, like Zapier Interfaces and Transfer, allow for smarter automation and handling data, sometimes using generative AI to process information.

Zapier is fantastic for users and businesses that need to automate multi-step processes across all the different tech tools they use. Its strength is its ability to connect thousands of different tools and automate complicated workflows without needing to code. While it can automate tasks that AI assistants often do, it’s primarily a platform for connecting and automating, and its AI features are more about making those connections smarter rather than being a conversational helper.

Choosing the right AI assistant for your needs

Okay, so you’ve seen some of the top AI assistants out there. Now comes the really important part: figuring out which one is actually the best fit for you or your team. There’s no single “best” assistant that works for everyone; it truly depends on what you need help with and how you like to work.

Here are a few key things to chew on before you make a decision.

Consider your specific tasks

Start by thinking about the jobs you find yourself doing over and over, or tasks that just eat up too much of your time. The first step is matching what the AI assistant is really good at with the tasks that are giving you the most trouble.

Consider tasks such as:

• Drafting emails
• Keeping your calendar straight
• Crunching data
• Handling questions from customers
• Research
• Writing content

Look at your existing tech stack

Consider the tools and platforms you use every single day. It’s super important to lean towards AI assistants that can connect smoothly with your current workflow. This helps you avoid creating new piles of data that don’t talk to each other or adding more manual work just to move information around. Tools like eesel AI, for example, are built specifically to plug right into your existing helpdesk and knowledge sources, making that connection really easy.

Think about the platforms you use:

• Helpdesks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom
• Knowledge bases like Confluence, Google Docs, or Notion

Factor in cost and scalability

How AI assistants charge can be quite different – some are free, some charge you per user each month, others charge based on how much you use them or how many interactions you have. Think about your budget now and how the costs might change as you need more from the tool or as your team gets bigger. If you expect to use it a lot or need to grow quickly, a pay-per-interaction model, like the one eesel AI uses, can give you more predictable costs compared to per-agent fees that go up every time you add a team member.

Common pricing models include:

• Free tiers
• Per-user monthly fees
• Usage-based pricing
• Pay-per-interaction models

Beyond the basics: AI agents vs. AI assistants

While we often use the terms “AI assistant” and “AI agent” pretty interchangeably, there’s a small but important difference, as folks like IBM and Salesforce have pointed out.

Think of AI assistants (like Siri or Google Assistant) as tools that react. They do specific tasks when you directly ask them to or give them a command. They’re great for quick things like setting a timer or answering a simple question.

AI agents, on the other hand, are more proactive and can work more on their own. If you give them a goal, they can often break it down into smaller steps, figure out how to do it themselves, and carry out multi-step processes independently using the tools available to them. eesel AI’s Agent, for example, can take a customer ticket, understand what the customer needs, find the right information, draft a response, and even do something like issue a refund – all without you having to tell it what to do for each step. Some advanced platforms, like eesel AI, actually offer tools that can do both, providing quick help when you ask and also handling tasks more autonomously.

Potential challenges and how to address them

Bringing AI assistants into your workflow can bring huge benefits, but it’s also smart to be aware of potential bumps in the road. Knowing when and how the AI hands things off to a human agent is really important for keeping customers happy, something Salesforce mentions is key.

Potential challenges include:

• Data quality: If the information the AI learns from isn’t accurate or has biases, its answers will be too.
• Integration difficulty: Getting the AI to work with your existing tools can sometimes be tricky if it doesn’t connect well, leading to workflows that feel broken.
• Handling complex requests: AI assistants aren’t perfect; they might struggle with requests that are complicated or unclear, meaning a human might need to step in.
• Agent handoff: Ensuring a smooth transition from AI to human support is crucial.

Picking a platform that lets you train it well, test things out and fine-tune them (like eesel AI’s simulation features), and offers good support can really help you handle these challenges and make sure your AI assistant is set up to succeed.

Transform your support with a smart, scalable AI partner

AI assistants have the potential to completely change how we work, giving us back time and making everything run more smoothly across different tasks. Choosing the right one means matching what you need with what the assistant can do, making sure it integrates seamlessly into your workflows, and ensuring it can grow with you over time.

For businesses that want to improve customer support and automate repetitive tasks, eesel AI stands out as a top solution. It is designed to connect deeply with the helpdesks and knowledge sources you already use, offering a cost-effective way to use both AI Agent and AI Assistant features. With eesel AI, you get smart automation, customizable workflows, and predictable pricing that scales with your interactions instead of your team size.

Ready to see how a smart, scalable AI partner can transform your support operations? You can start a trial or book a demo to see eesel AI in action. No credit card needed.