General-purpose AI chatbots for anything college throws at you
The default starting point for a reason: the free tier handles most coursework, from explaining concepts to drafting outlines and debugging code. You still have to verify facts yourself - it will happily make things up with total confidence.
Its killer student feature is context length - you can feed it entire 200-page PDFs and ask focused questions, which beats chunking readings into ChatGPT. The free tier is generous for writing-heavy majors.
If your whole academic life lives in Google Docs, Sheets and Classroom, Gemini's integrations make it the least-friction option. Image understanding is solid for interpreting diagrams, charts and graphs from slides.