The latest Bard is good, but at this time (Dec 2023), Bard is still not better than paid ChatGPT 4 in my experience.
I use both daily (I use ChatGPT on my phone and at home, Bard at work because work doesn't allow ChatGPT). ChatGPT 4 still provides the highest quality answers to the range of questions I'm interested in. Bard's getting better with Gemini but it's still not good.
Claude is great at summarizing PDFs and has one of the longest context windows, but the quality of answers it has to general questions is still lacking. Outside of summarization, I have little confidence in Claude's Q&A abilities.
I've also been using Perplexity.ai and I would say it hits a sweet spot and is impressive. It's essentially a RAG-based search engine that's fast and snappy and it works much better than Bing or ChatGPT Bing. Because it's primarily RAG driven, the content is primarily external and you get links to original sources so you can verify the answer. This means the level of hallucination is lower than foundational models. It's become a practical tool for me. It's CoPilot feature, which asks clarifying questions about your query, has been helpful for finding new products. For instance, I was looking for luggage packing cubes that convert to hanging cubes. It's a known product class but I didn't know the lingo, but over a few clarifying iterations, it was able to help me find the right product.