CoChat is an AI-powered tool that provides educators, students, and researchers with a host of capabilities when it comes to conducting research.
While there are other AI research tools, a common problem is citation hallucination. CoChat is designed to cut back on those hallucinations, and that feature is definitely a plus in my experience with CoChat.
Additionally, CoChat is great for deep research. When I searched topics, I was well-versed in, it brought up papers that had taken me hours and, in some cases, days, to track down on my own the old-fashioned way.
After using it for a few weeks, I am impressed with CoChat overall and find it to be the strongest AI deep research tool that I've tried. Here's a closer look at how CoChat works, what it costs, and its best features.
What is CoChat?
CoChat is an AI research tool that harnesses advanced LLMs, including GPT, Claude, and Google, to search more than 200 million academic papers. It offers a feature that allows you to compare different answers from different models and then choose the best one.
In practice, CoChat functions as a highly skilled, very quick research assistant that can find and summarize relevant research on a given topic. CoChat also automatically verifies citations to reduce the frequent AI problem of citation hallucination.
After using CoChat to search several different research areas, ranging from quantum physics to education and health, I have been impressed with its ability to quickly collate research that would take me hours to track down with a tool such as Google Scholar. As with any research tool, it didn’t find all relevant research, though it did a better job than other similar tools I’ve used previously.
More broadly, I still wonder whether there are benefits to the old-fashioned Google-style search. Certainly, the time I’ve spent searching for relevant research hasn’t all been a waste because when I’m doing it, part of my learning process is the search itself.
That said, I do like using a CoChat-like tool toward the end of the process, just to see if this different method turns up anything new.
What Are CoChat's Best Features?
CoChat’s best feature is its robust ability to search through academic research and summarize its findings, all while providing direct links to the original papers. It accomplishes this through access to cutting-edge AI models and, in my experience, seems capable of both speeding up new research and helping expand research I’d previously conducted.
Additional strong features are that it urges you to double-check its work and that its default writing mode is a conversational summary and literature review style. This review summary is helpful, and as an added bonus for educators, is not something a student might be tempted to hand in as their finished paper.
That said, CoChat does frequently offer to help students do more with their research. For instance, after telling me it made a literature review table, it offered to “turn this into a shorter plain-English brief or a tighter source matrix for class use.” When I took it up on this offer, I suspected it would turn the work into a paper that a student could then submit. By doing this, I worried it would move from what I see as an appropriate AI use, research assistance, to an inappropriate one, doing the writing and thinking for a student. Ultimately, those fears were unfounded. CoChat just condensed its findings and used a more conversational tone to explain.
Despite passing this test, when I explicitly asked CoChat to turn its findings into a paper for an assignment "in my class," it was willing to do that, which isn’t ideal.
Even so, given that the availability of AI tools willing to write your papers, emails, and texts is so widespread, it was refreshing that CoChat required this additional step.
What Does CoChat Cost?
The basic version of CoChat is completely free and is what I used for this article. I didn’t come up against any limitations, but there are some metered elements to the free tier such as three file uploads per day and a limit of 10 citation verifications.
Subscriptions start at $9 per month, and there is a pro tier at $19 per month.
The Best CoChat Tips and Tricks
Verify Research
One of CoChat’s main selling points is its ability to check sources it has cited to make sure none are fabricated. Users should take advantage of this feature.
Create an Instant Literature Review
CoChat is as good as any tool I’ve encountered at creating fast and helpful literature overviews on diverse topics.
Use It In Addition To Other Research
Even though it’s tempting to use CoChat at the start of your research, I like using CoChat after I’ve done some research to make sure I found all the relevant material and/or see if it turns up anything that I missed in my old-fashioned search; both happen on occasion. Therefore, using CoChat in this manner seems to deepen my research process overall.
