Selection: This is a selected marketplace, not a complete catalog. An assistant may be omitted because it is too new, too specialized, no longer significant, unavailable to most readers, or simply not yet important enough to include. The list can grow or change as the marketplace develops.

The Marketplace Beyond the United States

The U.S. assistants most familiar to readers are only part of the global AI assistant market.

China has developed a substantial domestic AI market, with several major providers offering assistants and model families that have become significant beyond their home market. Europe has its own developing AI sector, with providers such as Mistral AI building models and assistants for an international audience.

Availability is part of the marketplace story. Some services are broadly international, while others are primarily regional or may restrict access based on country, account, or service.

The entries below are selected examples rather than a complete list. Descriptions of their general areas provide orientation; the Current update focuses on developments since the book was published.

Alibaba / Qwen

Provider: Alibaba
Region: China
General area: General-purpose AI assistance, reasoning, coding, multimodal work, and connected services

Current update: Qwen has developed from an Alibaba model family into a broader AI ecosystem that includes a consumer assistant and increasingly capable agent-style functions.

Availability: International availability is expanding, but some Qwen services and Alibaba integrations are region-specific.

DeepSeek

Provider: DeepSeek
Region: China
General area: General-purpose assistance, reasoning, coding, research, and technical work

Current update: DeepSeek has continued to advance its reasoning and general-purpose models, including the V4 family, with models available through its web service, app, and API.

Availability: DeepSeek is available internationally, but its terms state that service availability and features can vary by jurisdiction.

Kimi

Provider: Moonshot AI
Region: China
General area: General-purpose assistance, research, long-context work, reasoning, coding, and multimodal tasks

Current update: Kimi has expanded well beyond its earlier long-context role, with newer models supporting multimodal work, coding, research, agent tasks, and multi-agent workflows.

Availability: Kimi is available through its website, app, API, and coding services, with particular products and features varying by market.

GLM

Provider: Zhipu AI / Z.AI
Region: China
General area: General-purpose assistance, reasoning, coding, research, and multimodal work

Current update: The GLM family has continued moving into longer-horizon reasoning, coding, and agentic work, with Z.AI offering newer GLM models through both consumer and developer services.

Availability: Z.AI provides international access, though particular models, plans, and services may have different access requirements.

ERNIE

Provider: Baidu
Region: China
General area: General-purpose assistance, search, content creation, reasoning, and enterprise AI

Current update: Baidu continues developing ERNIE as part of its broader AI platform, with newer models and capabilities extending its role beyond the earlier chatbot-focused experience.

Availability: ERNIE remains primarily oriented toward the Chinese market, so availability for U.S. readers may be limited or differ from the experience available in China.

Doubao

Provider: ByteDance
Region: China
General area: General-purpose assistance, multimodal creation, search, productivity, and everyday tasks

Current update: Doubao has become a major consumer AI service in China, with ByteDance continuing to expand its underlying models, multimodal capabilities, and agent-oriented functions.

Availability: Doubao is primarily a China-market service and should not be presented as broadly available to U.S. readers.

Mistral AI / Le Chat

Provider: Mistral AI
Region: France / Europe
General area: General-purpose assistance, reasoning, coding, research, and enterprise AI

Current update: Mistral has expanded from an open-model company into a broader AI provider, with Le Chat gaining deeper research, work, coding, and agent capabilities alongside Mistral's model and enterprise offerings.

Availability: Le Chat is available internationally, with particular features and plans varying by country and service.

Selection note

This is a selected marketplace, not a complete catalog. An assistant may be omitted because it is too new, too specialized, no longer significant, unavailable to most readers, or simply not yet important enough to include. The list can grow, shrink, or change as the marketplace develops.

Specialized AI: A Second Dimension of the Marketplace

The global marketplace is organized by geography, but geography is only one way to view it. AI systems are increasingly differentiated by the kind of work they are built to support.

A general-purpose assistant may handle many kinds of work. A specialized AI tool may be built around one medium, profession, or task. The distinction is useful even as the boundaries between the two become less distinct.

Images

AI image systems can create, modify, and refine visual material from text, images, or a combination of both. They differ in the kinds of images they produce, the degree of control they provide, and the creative workflows they support.

Midjourney

Provider: Midjourney

Region: United States

Specialized area: Image generation and visual creation

Current update: Midjourney's current V8.2 model focuses on image quality, aesthetics, and personalization. Its tools include image prompts, style references, moodboards, personalization, variations, and controls for composition and visual treatment. Midjourney has expanded into video generation from images as well.

Availability: Available internationally through Midjourney's website and Discord, with features and usage varying by subscription plan.

Adobe Firefly

Provider: Adobe

Region: United States

Specialized area: Image generation, image editing, and creative production

Current update: Firefly has developed into a broader creative AI studio. It supports text-to-image, image-to-image, style and composition changes, sketch-to-image, and other visual workflows. Adobe has added access to multiple AI models alongside its own Firefly models, giving users a broader set of creative options within the Firefly environment.

Availability: Available internationally through Adobe's Firefly service, with features, models, and usage limits varying by plan and region.

Ideogram

Provider: Ideogram

Region: Canada

Specialized area: Image generation, graphic design, and typography

Current update: Ideogram 4.0 is its current image-generation model and is positioned around design-oriented image creation, stronger prompt fidelity, typography, editing, and production workflows. Ideogram has introduced editable text layers that let users modify text within generated designs without regenerating the entire image.

Availability: Available through the Ideogram website and API, with free and paid access and additional enterprise options. Ideogram 4.0 is available as an open-weight model under a commercial license.

Music and Audio

AI music systems can generate songs and instrumental pieces from descriptions, lyrics, musical ideas, or other audio. They can increasingly support editing and production, too, moving beyond simple song generation.

Suno

Provider: Suno
Region: United States
Specialized area: Music and audio generation, songwriting, vocals, arrangement, and music production

Current update: Suno's capabilities have expanded well beyond generating a song from a prompt. Its current tools include songwriting assistance, Voices, personalized and custom models, remixing, audio uploads, stem separation, and editing. Suno Studio 2.0, released in August 2026, adds MIDI, audio effects, built-in synthesis, automation, and a chat-based interface for generating instruments, vocals, and custom plugins.

Availability: Suno is available internationally through its web and mobile applications. A free plan is available, with additional capabilities and higher usage limits on paid plans. Studio 2.0 is currently available to Premier subscribers.

Udio

Provider: Udio
Region: United States
Specialized area: Music generation, songwriting, vocals, remixing, and audio editing

Current update: Udio provides tools for generating songs from prompts and lyrics, extending and remixing music, working from uploaded audio, editing music and lyrics, and creating variations using Styles and Voices. Its Sessions tools provide a more detailed environment for working on individual songs.

Udio has entered licensing partnerships with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group as it develops its next-generation music service. The partnerships are intended to support licensed use of artists' voices and styles and new forms of remixing and music creation.

Availability: Udio is available through its website and has an official iOS app. It does not currently offer an official Android app. Free and paid access are available, with features and usage limits varying by account level.

Runway

Provider: Runway
Region: United States
Specialized area: AI video generation, video editing, visual effects, and creative production

Current update: Runway has expanded from a video-generation system into a broader creative platform. Its current tools support text-to-video, image-to-video, video-to-video editing, extending clips, changing backgrounds, adding or removing objects, relighting scenes, character consistency, and AI-generated dialogue, voiceover, and music. Gen-4.5 is its current advanced video-generation model, while Aleph 2.0 provides AI-assisted video editing.

Availability: Runway is available internationally through its website, with web, iOS, and Android access. A free plan is available, with additional capabilities and usage on paid plans.

Kling AI

Provider: Kuaishou Technology
Region: China
Specialized area: AI video generation, image-to-video, storyboarding, motion, and audiovisual creation

Current update: Kling 3.0 supports text-to-video, image-to-video, reference-to-video, and in-video editing. Its 3.0 series adds stronger consistency across characters, objects, and scenes, native audio generation, and video generation up to 15 seconds. Video 3.0 Omni adds multi-shot storyboard controls for specifying shot duration, perspective, narrative content, and camera movement.

Availability: Kling AI is available through its web-based creative studio, with access and features varying by service and plan.

Google Veo

Provider: Google DeepMind
Region: United States
Specialized area: Video generation, cinematic creation, image-to-video, visual effects, and audiovisual storytelling

Current update: Veo 3.1 is Google's current leading video-generation model. It supports text-to-video and image-to-video generation, native audio including dialogue and sound effects, reference images, camera controls, first-and-last-frame transitions, object insertion, video extension, and vertical video. Veo is available through Google's Gemini, Flow, API, and other Google services.

Availability: Access varies by Google product, plan, region, and service. Veo 3.1 is available through Gemini and Flow, with developer access through the Gemini API and Vertex AI. 

Coding

AI coding systems have moved well beyond autocomplete. Specialized coding tools can understand a codebase, write and modify code across multiple files, find and fix bugs, run tests, work with repositories, and in some cases operate as agents that carry out multi-step development tasks.

Claude Code

Provider: Anthropic
Region: United States
Specialized area: Agentic coding, software development, codebase analysis, debugging, and development workflows

Current update: Claude Code is a coding agent that can work directly with a software project, inspect its files, make changes, run commands, and handle multi-step development tasks. It is particularly suited to terminal-based development and larger codebases.

Availability: Available internationally through Anthropic's Claude service, with access depending on plan and usage.

Cursor

Provider: Cursor
Region: United States
Specialized area: AI-assisted software development, code editing, codebase analysis, and coding agents

Current update: Cursor has developed from an AI-enhanced code editor into an agent-based development environment. Its current tools can understand a codebase, plan and build features, fix bugs, review changes, run checks, work with GitHub and other development services, and launch multiple agents for larger projects.

Availability: Available internationally as a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with additional web and agent capabilities. Plans and usage limits vary.

Provider: GitHub / Microsoft
Region: United States
Specialized area: Code completion, coding assistance, software development, repository work, and coding agents

Current update: GitHub Copilot has expanded from inline code suggestions into a broader coding assistant. It supports chat, code completion, multi-file development, code review, and a coding agent that can work from GitHub issues and create pull requests. Its broad integration with development environments makes it useful for people who already work in GitHub and supported IDEs.

Availability: Available internationally through GitHub, with free and paid plans and features varying by plan.

Research and Search

Research-oriented AI systems are built around finding information, gathering sources, comparing material, synthesizing results, and presenting research with supporting citations. General-purpose assistants increasingly provide many of these capabilities, but research is the central focus of the systems below.

Perplexity

Provider: Perplexity AI
Region: United States
Specialized area: AI search, source-based research, deep research, and information synthesis

Current update: Perplexity has developed from an AI search engine into a broader research platform. Its research features can search multiple sources, analyze information, synthesize findings, and produce cited reports. Its current offerings include Deep Research and more extensive computer-based research capabilities.

Availability: Available internationally through the web and mobile applications, with free and paid plans offering different capabilities and usage limits.

You.com

Provider: You.com
Region: United States
Specialized area: AI search, research, source gathering, and customizable research workflows

Current update: You.com combines web search with AI-generated answers and research capabilities. It has increasingly focused on enterprise research and customizable AI agents, giving users options for different research tasks and workflows.

Availability: Available internationally through its website, with free and paid access and enterprise offerings.

Phind

Provider: Phind
Region: United States
Specialized area: Technical search, developer research, coding assistance, and source-based answers

Current update: Phind is particularly oriented toward technical questions and software development. It combines web search with AI reasoning to help users investigate programming problems, technical documentation, and related information.

Availability: Available through its website, with access and usage varying by service level.

Presentations

AI presentation systems are built around turning ideas, source material, or instructions into presentations and other visual documents. They can help with structure, slide design, graphics, layouts, and presentation drafts.

Gamma

Provider: Gamma
Region: United States
Specialized area: AI presentations, visual documents, slide structure, and design

Current update: Gamma has expanded beyond presentation generation into a broader AI workspace for presentations, documents, websites, and other visual content. Its presentation tools can turn text or source material into structured decks, then help revise layouts, visuals, and content.

Availability: Available internationally through its website, with free and paid plans offering different features and usage limits.

Canva

Provider: Canva
Region: Australia
Specialized area: Presentation design, visual content, graphics, and AI-assisted creative work

Current update: Canva combines AI-assisted presentation creation with its broader visual-design platform. Its AI tools can help generate presentations, text, images, layouts, graphics, and other design elements within an existing Canva workflow.

Availability: Available internationally through the web and mobile applications, with free and paid plans.

Beautiful.ai

Provider: Beautiful.ai
Region: United States
Specialized area: AI-assisted presentation design, slide layouts, and business presentations

Current update: Beautiful.ai focuses on presentation creation and automated slide design. Its system uses structured layouts to help users create presentations while maintaining consistent formatting as content changes.

Availability: Available internationally through its web service, with paid plans and options for teams and organizations.

Writing

AI writing systems focus on producing, revising, and improving written material. Some are broad-purpose assistants with strong writing capabilities; others are built specifically around writing, editing, publishing, or particular forms of content.

Grammarly

Provider: Grammarly
Region: United States
Specialized area: Writing assistance, editing, grammar, tone, rewriting, and communication

Current update: Grammarly has expanded from grammar and spelling correction into a broader AI writing platform. Its current tools can help generate, rewrite, summarize, adjust tone, improve clarity, and provide writing assistance across different applications and communication settings.

Availability: Available internationally through web and desktop applications, browser extensions, mobile applications, and integrations with other software. Free and paid plans are available.

Jasper

Provider: Jasper
Region: United States
Specialized area: Marketing writing, content creation, brand voice, and business communications

Current update: Jasper focuses on AI-assisted marketing and business content rather than general-purpose conversation. Its platform supports content creation, brand voice, campaign development, rewriting, and related marketing workflows.

Availability: Available internationally through its web platform, with paid plans and business offerings.

Sudowrite

Provider: Sudowrite
Region: United States
Specialized area: Creative writing, fiction, storytelling, and revision

Current update: Sudowrite is built specifically for fiction writers. Its tools can help develop ideas, continue scenes, rewrite passages, describe settings and characters, and work through longer-form stories.

Availability: Available through its website, with subscription plans and a trial period.

Design

AI-assisted design systems focus on creating and refining visual layouts, graphics, branding, marketing materials, and other design work. Some overlap heavily with image-generation systems, but their emphasis is on designing something for a purpose, rather than simply generating an image.

Canva

Provider: Canva
Region: Australia
Specialized area: Graphic design, layouts, branding, marketing materials, and AI-assisted visual creation

Current update: Canva combines traditional design tools with AI-assisted creation. Its AI features can help generate designs from descriptions, create and edit images, produce layouts, write or rewrite content, and adapt designs for different uses. Canva's broader platform makes it particularly useful for people who want AI assistance without giving up direct control over the finished design.

Availability: Available internationally through web and mobile applications, with free and paid plans.

Adobe Express

Provider: Adobe
Region: United States
Specialized area: Graphic design, social media content, marketing materials, image editing, and AI-assisted creation

Current update: Adobe Express combines templates and conventional design tools with Adobe's generative AI capabilities. Users can create and edit images, remove or replace backgrounds, generate visual elements, resize content, and produce graphics for social media, marketing, presentations, and other uses.

Availability: Available internationally through the web and mobile applications, with free and paid plans.

Figma

Provider: Figma
Region: United States
Specialized area: Interface design, collaborative design, prototyping, and AI-assisted product design

Current update: Figma is primarily a collaborative design platform rather than an image-generation system. Its AI capabilities are increasingly integrated into interface design and prototyping, helping users generate and modify designs, work with content, and move from concepts toward interactive prototypes.

Availability: Available internationally through its web and desktop applications, with free and paid plans.

Voice and Speech

AI voice and speech systems can generate spoken audio, transcribe speech, translate voices, create narration, and transform recorded voices. This category includes tools aimed primarily at audio production, rather than general-purpose assistants that happen to support voice conversation.

ElevenLabs

Provider: ElevenLabs
Region: United States
Specialized area: Voice generation, voice cloning, narration, dubbing, and audio production

Current update: ElevenLabs has expanded from text-to-speech into a broader audio platform. Its tools support voice generation, voice cloning, speech-to-speech conversion, dubbing, sound effects, and conversational voice applications. Its emphasis remains on highly controllable and natural-sounding generated speech.

Availability: Available internationally through its website and APIs, with free and paid plans and usage varying by service.

Descript

Provider: Descript
Region: United States
Specialized area: Speech transcription, voice generation, podcasting, video and audio editing

Current update: Descript combines transcription with audio and video editing. Its AI tools can generate or modify speech, remove filler words, improve recordings, and let users edit spoken material by editing the transcript.

Availability: Available internationally through desktop and web applications, with free and paid plans.

Speechify

Provider: Speechify
Region: United States
Specialized area: Text-to-speech, narration, reading assistance, and voice generation

Current update: Speechify is focused on turning written material into natural-sounding spoken audio. It supports documents, web pages, books, and other text, with a large selection of voices and languages. Its AI voice capabilities have expanded into voice generation and related audio applications.

Availability: Available internationally through web, desktop, browser, and mobile applications, with free and paid options.