Learning
Turn course material into structured notes and self-test questions, and check them against the original.
Tool types that fit: General assistant, Research
I am learning [topic]. My current level is [short description].
First break the topic into 3-5 key concepts, then explain each with an everyday example.
Then give me 3 questions to check my understanding, without the answers.
If my information is not enough, ask me the single most important question first.
Separate checkable facts, your inferences, and anything you are unsure about.Asking AI to flag uncertainty does not make its answer correct. Keep checking the parts that matter.
Listed by name, not ranked. You can only compare tools of the same type side by side.
ChatGPT is OpenAI's chat assistant on the web, desktop and mobile; a beginner might try it for drafting text, asking questions with web search, or asking about an uploaded document or image.
Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant on the web, desktop and mobile; a beginner might try it for writing and editing text, asking about an uploaded PDF or image, or questions that need a web search.
DeepSeek is an AI chat assistant on the web and in iOS and Android apps; a beginner might try it for questions, writing help, or answers that use its web search function.
Gemini is Google's AI assistant on the web, desktop and mobile; a beginner might try it for everyday questions, summarising an uploaded document, or a Deep Research report built from Google Search results.
Consensus is an AI academic search engine that finds peer-reviewed papers and summarizes them with in-line citations; a beginner might try it to see what published studies say about a question.
Elicit is an AI research assistant that searches academic papers and produces cited reports, tables and systematic-review workflows; a beginner might try it to find and summarize papers on a research question.
Perplexity is an AI search engine that answers questions from real-time web results with numbered citations; a beginner might try it to look up a topic and then open the cited sources.