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FOBIE.ai

Look into something properly before I commit

A supplier, a piece of equipment, a market you are thinking of entering. This job is about a briefing with its sources attached, in an hour rather than a week.

What a good result looks like

Use this to judge a demo. A tool that cannot do these is not doing the job, whatever it is called.

  • Every claim has a link, and the links are real and current.
  • It disagrees with itself where the sources disagree, rather than smoothing it over.
  • It tells you what it could not find out.
  • You can follow up without starting again.

What usually goes wrong

The things people find out after they have paid.

  • Citations can be fabricated or can point at a page that does not say what is claimed. Open them.
  • Recent events are the weak spot of most of these tools.
  • A confident summary of a thin evidence base reads exactly like a confident summary of a strong one.

4 tools that do this

How this list is ordered — and why money is not one of the reasons
  1. 1. How squarely the tool does this job. A tool built for this job comes before one that can be made to do it. A tool that needs wiring up comes last.
  2. 2. How much we actually know about it. A tool we have used ourselves comes before one we have only researched, which comes before one only a reader has written in about, which comes before one nobody has assessed. A tool low on this list is not bad. It is unknown.
  3. 3. How technical you need to be. Where the first two signals tie, the one a non-technical person can set up alone comes first. This site is for people who are not going to write code.
  4. 4. How recently we checked the listing. A listing we checked last month is worth more to you than one we checked last year, so it breaks the remaining ties. Listings we have never checked come last.

Nothing commercial appears on that list, and nothing commercial is given to the code that orders it. How we make money, and how you can check.

  1. Perplexity

    by Perplexity AI

    Built for exactly this: ask a question, get an answer with its sources listed.

    Built for thisListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  2. ChatGPT

    by OpenAI

    Will search the web and cite, but the citations need opening.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  3. Claude

    by Anthropic

    Will lay out where sources disagree instead of averaging them.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  4. Gemini

    by Google

    Tied into Google Search, which helps on recent things.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

Reviews against this job

Listed, not reviewedIt is in the directory. Nobody here has assessed it yet.

Nobody here has assessed any of these tools against this job yet. The listings above describe what each one is sold to do and how squarely it fits — which is real information — but none of it is a verdict, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Used one of these for this job? Tell us what happened — reader reports are published as reader reports, in your words, clearly labelled.

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