Not every AI chatbot is built for the same job. Some, like ChatGPT and Claude, are general-purpose assistants that can be adapted to almost anything with the right prompting. Others, like Intercom Fin, Drift, and Tidio, are built specifically to sit on a company website and answer customer support questions.
Purpose-built support chatbots
Intercom Fin answers support tickets by pulling directly from a company's existing help center content, escalating to a human when it cannot find a confident answer. That "answer from our own docs" approach is the main thing that separates a support chatbot from a general assistant -- it reduces made-up answers because it is grounded in real, approved content rather than open-ended reasoning.
Drift leans more toward sales and marketing: qualifying website visitors, answering pre-sales questions, and booking meetings, rather than resolving existing customer issues.
Tidio combines live chat with a simpler AI layer, aimed at smaller e-commerce stores that want automated answers to common questions (shipping, returns, order status) without a large support team.
General-purpose assistants as a stopgap
ChatGPT and Claude are not built for this out of the box, but plenty of smaller sites use them behind a simple custom integration for basic Q&A. This works reasonably well for straightforward questions but takes real engineering effort to keep answers grounded in the right information and to avoid the assistant confidently guessing at answers it does not actually know.
Which to pick
If support volume is the actual problem you are solving, a purpose-built tool like Fin or Tidio will get you further, faster, since the "answer from our documentation" behavior is built in rather than something you have to engineer yourself. If you are earlier-stage and mostly want to experiment, a general assistant is a reasonable place to start.
Browse more options, including live chat platforms and voice assistants, in our AI Chatbots directory.