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At first, I was excited about DeepSeek. As an AI chatbot touted as a formidable rival to ChatGPT, it claimed to offer powerful features and a dynamic conversational experience. However, after putting it through its paces, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with its limitations.
My Frustrations with DeepSeek
One of my major concerns with DeepSeek is its server reliability. I’ve often found myself spending too much time waiting for responses, and I frequently receive notifications that their servers are overloaded, urging me to try again later. While I appreciate that scaling a rapidly popular service takes time, it doesn’t diminish the fact that their platform can be completely unusable at times.
Even when I manage to use DeepSeek, the interactions often feel flat. Although the chatbot can generate responses, they tend to lack warmth and depth. Additionally, it struggles with maintaining the conversational context, making it challenging to engage in a fluid dialogue—especially when compared to ChatGPT, which excels in providing nuanced and contextually aware replies.
Another significant letdown has been the restrictions on file uploads. Although DeepSeek permits users to upload files, its capabilities are limited to text extraction. It doesn’t accommodate image processing, audio handling, or other file types, which is a stark contrast to offerings from many other AI chatbots. Given the usefulness of image and audio uploads, this limitation is hard to overlook.
Finally, DeepSeek’s lack of a live voice feature in its mobile app led me to uninstall it shortly after downloading. I found the live voice option incredibly convenient for using an AI chatbot on my phone. With competitors like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity all offering this feature, I see no reason to stick with DeepSeek on my mobile device.
Why ChatGPT is Better
While there are still valid reasons to explore DeepSeek, I’ve reverted to using ChatGPT because I consider it superior in several essential aspects.
1. Reliability and Accessibility
ChatGPT is significantly more dependable than DeepSeek. Even during peak usage, I rarely face downtime that prevents me from accessing their service. Thanks to OpenAI’s extensive infrastructure investment, the experience is reliable and seamless.
2. Engaging and Context-Aware Conversations
In contrast to DeepSeek’s lackluster responses, ChatGPT offers more engaging and human-like interactions. It excels in remembering context, providing thorough explanations, and adapting its responses based on prior messages.
3. Advanced File Uploads and Analysis
Returning to ChatGPT freed me from the constraints of mere text extraction. I can upload images, tables, and graphs, and have the AI elucidate details and nuances that I might overlook just by reviewing an image.
4. Voice Conversations for a More Natural Interaction
One feature of ChatGPT I sincerely missed was its live voice capability. This feature offers many creative ways to facilitate daily tasks and helps resolve unexpected issues efficiently. I can easily snap a picture of a problem and describe the details directly to the AI, all while my hands are occupied, which enhances its practicality in real-life situations.
Although I’m no longer dependent on DeepSeek for critical tasks, I believe it still warrants exploration. Towards the end of 2022, ChatGPT faced similar issues as DeepSeek while rapidly growing in popularity. This gives me hope that many of the issues I currently see with DeepSeek stem from scaling challenges and feature implementation delays. I plan to revisit DeepSeek once it develops further.
For now, however, I see no reason to continue using it, particularly since ChatGPT fully meets my needs.
