As consumer services, distinct from their use as professional tools and time-savers, these three main chatbots are mostly good for three things; quickly answering queries you would otherwise have to trawl through the web for, summarising a lot of information in an easy-to-read format, and taking a stab at creative writing tasks based on any given prompt.

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Think of it as though you have a personal assistant with access to the internet; you can call out whatever you need to know and they’ll work it out. Except it happens in seconds. In the future this assistant might be able to book or buy things on your behalf, or call and message people directly, but right now they’re just finding out and talking back.

You might use a chatbot in the exact way you’d use a search engine, but with the ability to be much more specific. For example, if I want to find out what movies Robert Davi is in, I don’t need to Google “Robert Davi” and find a link to IMDB, I just ask the AI “what films is Robert Davi in” and it answers in plain English.

Some other examples of what you might put to a chatbot instead of a search engine could be:

• What does “day cocktail” mean as a dress code?
• Can guinea pigs eat green beans?
• Do I need an internet router with Wi-Fi 6E?

But chatbots are also generally good at summarising subjects, giving advice or creating on-the-fly explainers that would ordinarily require more thorough research than a single search, and can contain a number of modifiers. For example:

• Why are people mad at [insert beleaguered public figure here] this week?
• Think of some good birthday gifts for my friend who loves gardening but can’t do a lot of physical activity.
• Compare the Toyota CH-R and Mazda MX-30, considering I have a family of five, live in the suburbs and drive to the country often.

And finally, chatbots are primarily designed to communicate confidently and understand how humans speak to one another, so they are also good at writing tasks. You could ask:

• Write a short children’s story about a puppy, which explains to my seven-year-old why she can’t judge other children too harshly for being mean.
• Here’s a text from my friend Jim inviting me to a pizza night next week. Write a reply that declines as politely as possible.
• Write a rhyming poem to go in someone’s card based on these three facts about them.

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This all comes with the caveat that chatbots on your phone have the same significant weaknesses as chatbots anywhere else. They make factual errors quite often and will express them with absolute confidence.

They have a tendency to “hallucinate”, meaning they can come up with ideas seemingly out of nowhere during the complex process of finding and processing information. They don’t always do a good job of telling you where they got their information. And because their responses are generated on the fly, they are often inconsistent.

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