Top 5 Open Source AI Chatbots for Developers

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a huge deal when building software because of its capabilities. While some developers may be skeptical about the rise of AI and bots, many have embraced these tools to enhance their productivity and creativity.

In this article, we will explore the top 5 open source AI chatbots that stand out for their features, community support and contributions for developers to use in their workflow or use to build their own AI tool. These chatbots can be integrated into existing workflows or used as building blocks for creating custom AI tools for developers.

Here are the best open source AI chatbots for you to try!

Pieces Demo Copilot

Pieces is an AI-enabled tool for software developers, designed by software developers to improve efficiency and collaboration within a team or individual coding. Pieces has an open-source example copilot project that uses their TypeScript SDK to imitate the core functionalities of Pieces Copilot where you can run the project locally and interact with available cloud and local large language models.

This copilot example project is powered by both Local Large Language models (LLLMs) such as Mistral AI, Phi-2, and Llama 2, as well as cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, Gemini, and PaLM 2. Learn what the best LLM for coding is based on your hardware and workflow requirements.

This project is 100% open source and is great for developers that love AI and want to build their own open source copilot or understand Pieces Copilot under the hood. There are also SDKs in Python, Dart and Kotlin you can try out, depending on which language you’re comfortable with when working with their open source chatbot framework.

While Pieces Copilot has the ability to answer questions and generate contextual code based on your unique development workflow using various LLMs, it is primarily used by developers. Their technology supports an intelligent workflow copilot that can help you save, enrich, share, and generate code, whereas a traditional chatbot is only focused on conversational interactions and may span beyond a wider audience. Learn the difference between conversational and generative AI before selecting the open source chatbot builder for you.

Pieces has a Discord community where you can chat with other developers to collaborate on a project.

Hugging Chat

Hugging Face is a well-known platform in the field of machine learning, serving as a community for collaborators on models, datasets, and applications.

The hugging face team built an open source chatbot that is powered by open source models such as Mistral AI, Code Llama, Gemma and Open Assistant that lets users search the web for a more accurate, detailed response.

Before committing to creating an account, this project provides the option to use the Hugging chatbot for a limited period as a guest, enabling users to assess the quality of the responses.

Hugging face has a Discord community where you get to talk to other users or developers, learn more about their products and tools, and collaborate on projects.

Rasa

Rasa is an open source platform that lets you create your own AI software with the help of its open source chatbot framework. This platform provides you with the flexibility to train your models, customize them to meet with your specific requirements, and modify your Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component to make it more personalized.

By using Rasa, you gain the ability to develop a free open source AI chatbot that suits your unique needs and preferences.

Rasa has a diverse community of conversational AI users and builders.

Botpress

Botpress is a chatbot open source builder built by the OpenAI team; the aim of this software is to build bots or chatbots similar to ChatGPT for your personal or company use to improve you or your team’s productivity and efficiency.

With botpress, you can build bots or chatbots that understand natural language, automate tasks easily, and personalize your experience. Botpress is a powerful tool for building and deploying conversational AI applications, enabling businesses to automate tasks, improve customer engagement, and enhance productivity. Botpress has a large and active community of developers and users who contribute to its development and provide support.

Claudia Bot Builder

Claudia.js is an open-source serverless JavaScript framework that makes it easy to build and deploy AI chat bots on AWS. It requires minimal prior knowledge of machine learning and AI, making it accessible to a wide range of developers.

Claudia uses serverless models to remove the need to manage servers thereby making development easy, cost-efficient and scalable. As an open source project, Claudia.js benefits from a vibrant community of contributors and users. This ensures regular updates, feature enhancements, and support for new technologies.

Claudia has a large community where you can chat with the maintainers if you feel lost either using the framework or contributing to it. You get to also talk with other users and contributors.

Benefits of Using Open-Source AI Chatbots:

Cost-effectiveness

Open-source AI chatbots are a cost-effective solution that provides better user experience. With so many developers actively contributing to the software, users can navigate it with ease while getting improvements based on community insights and experiences.

Transparency

As the software or chatbot is open source, it is transparent in the sense that developers have easy access or a free pass to inspect the source code, identify bugs or errors and improve the overall security. This helps developers rely on the software and understand the chatbot functions.

Customization

Open source chatbots provide developers with the freedom to modify and extend their functionality to specific requirements or project needs. This flexibility allows for customization and integration with existing systems, enabling developers to create personalized solutions that align with their use cases.

By utilizing open source AI chatbots, developers gain control over the bot's behavior, appearance, and features, resulting in a personalized and enhanced user experience.

Community support

Open source communities are so known for offering active support, detailed documentation, and a wealth of resources that assist in troubleshooting and knowledge sharing.

Conclusion

The landscape of open source AI chatbots is quite dynamic with amazing possibilities for developers to build their version of a chatbot to assist in their projects. Through this article, we learned about five open source AI chatbot tools you can use that offer an amazing conversational AI flow, resources and lots more.

Be it using natural language processing, community-driven contributions or machine learning algorithms, your journey with open source AI will give you a way to understand how AIs are built, trained and used very well; this helps in shaping human-computer interactions.

Do check out this guide on how to build your own copilot in less than 10 minutes with Pieces TypeScript SDK.