People spend months comparing assistants and learn almost nothing, because comparison is not practice. The three leading options are close enough on everyday professional work that the habit of using one daily beats the marginal advantage of picking the theoretically best one.
What actually differs
Not raw intelligence on ordinary tasks — that gap narrows with every release. What differs is fit:
- Long documents and careful reasoning. If your work means reading fifty-page reports and being held to what they say, favour whichever assistant handles long input and citation of its own source material most reliably.
- Fast drafting and breadth. If your day is many small pieces of writing and thinking, speed and ecosystem matter more than depth on any single one.
- Sitting next to your files and email. If your material already lives in one company's productivity suite, the assistant embedded in that suite removes a lot of copying and pasting.
Test them properly, in one afternoon
Take one real task with a known good answer. Run it through each assistant with the identical prompt and the same pasted material. Judge three things: did it invent anything, did it follow the format, and how much editing did the output need. That is a more useful comparison than any benchmark table.
Then commit for a month
Pay for one, use it every working day, and stop looking. Switching weekly is how people spend six months collecting opinions instead of skills. Once one assistant is a habit, trying a second takes an afternoon — and you will finally have a baseline to judge it against.
The settings worth checking on day one
Whether your conversations are used for training, what your employer permits, and what happens to anything client-confidential. Decide once, deliberately.
Try this today
Pick your one real task with a known good answer, and write down the three things you will judge the output on before you run it anywhere.