Jasper Review | PCMag

Jasper is one of those tools you didn’t know you needed, especially if you work in marketing. It uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help you create entire campaigns with spot-on copy and the desired delivery. Though it’s more specialized in its use cases than other generative AI chatbots, Jasper is an Editors’ Choice winner thanks to the quality of everything it delivers, from copy to stories to artwork.

What Is Jasper?

Jasper is an AI tool that seeks to be your one-stop shop for creating content for your business. It’s specifically good at tasks such as writing or improving marketing copy, developing a comprehensive content strategy, writing content or product briefs, summarizing Zoom meetings, creating social media posts, and helping with headlines.

You use Jasper in a way similar to other generative AI chatbots, like ChatGPT and Google Bard. It’s a text-based chatbot. You type in prompts or ask questions, and it gives you text-based answers or gives you images if you ask for them. You can ask follow-up questions or refine a previous prompt, like asking it to make an answer simpler.

How Much Does Jasper Cost?

Jasper may seem like a costly tool, but it offers quite a bit for the money. There’s no free version. First is the Creator plan at $49 per month or $468 per year. It’s the base plan and includes access for a single user, a Brand Voice (a writing style that you establish for the AI for your brand), 50 Knowledge Assets (information that you feed the AI to train it on your company or brand), 50 templates, SEO mode, and access to the browser extension.

The next most expensive tier is a Pro plan, which costs $69 per month or $708 per year. It allows up to three users and three Brand Voices. With Pro, you get everything in the Creator plan plus DIY templates, marketing campaigns, and a collaboration management tool. 

The top tier is the Business plan, which has custom pricing. It has no limitations on features and includes API access, custom style guides, enterprise-grade security, an advanced admin panel with permissions, and more.

What Can Jasper Do?

Let’s start with my admission that as someone who’s been writing for about half my life, the rise of artificial intelligence, and AI writing tools in particular, has left me a little nervous. My worries were somewhat alleviated when I tested out Bard and ChatGPT because I found them to be lacking when it comes to writing content and mediocre at best for researching anything. At one point, I was updating a guide to Kindle devices and thought of using Bard to search the topic. Imagine my surprise when it pulled content straight out of an article yours truly wrote, word for word! While that may be flattering, the instructions were no longer accurate due to a software update—and there was absolutely no attribution, either. 

(Credit: Jasper/PCMag)

After testing Jasper, I am back to being slightly worried. It’s a great tool if you know how to phrase your requests. Jasper has multiple uses, but they’re all business-focused. It can create marketing campaigns, write product descriptions for retailers, improve or rewrite text, come up with headlines, outline a blog post you might write, and list topic ideas. It’s an ideal tool for businesses that need to produce content with a consistent style quickly.

Copywriters can also use Jasper to create captivating company bios for websites, develop Facebook or Google ads, generate captions for images shared on Instagram, write video descriptions for YouTube or TikTok, and so on. The possibilities are vast, and Jasper has them all organized in templates that are easy to use.

If you’d rather not rely on templates, you can use Jasper in a more freestyle way by giving it prompts, commands, and questions.

Jasper has tools to ensure your content isn’t flagged for plagiarism by Google or anyone else. Intuitively named the Plagiarism Checker, it scans your text for content originality. 

Jasper also has an Integration settings portal where you could, for example, enable Surfer SEO. This third-party tool gives you feedback on your writing so you can better target it for search engine optimization. When you use Surfer SEO with Jasper, you get a tab on your document editor that tells you keyword research and other metrics you can use to shape your text accordingly. Integrations are also available for Grammarly, Make.com, and Zapier.

Two more tasks people commonly ask AI chatbots to do are translating text and writing code. Jasper can do both of these jobs, too. While you won’t find any coding templates, you can just open the chatbot and make your code-writing request much like you would in any other chatbot.

(Credit: Jasper/PCMag)

As for translations, you can get them with a single click. Translation comes with some risks, so it’s best if someone at your business understands enough to check the results.

If you want to create images, that’s also something that Jasper can do. Jasper Art gives you a ton of options to customize your creation in Free Form mode. You can start by typing in a description of what you want to create and then choosing a mood, a medium, an inspiration, a style, and keywords. Alternatively, you can use one of the available templates, but there are fewer customizations available. As with all generative AI tools for images, the results are hit-and-miss. 

Another way you can put Jasper to use is to start conversations with the chatbot. There are no limitations on how many questions you can ask, and you can always revisit your conversations. 

Becoming a Better Prompt Engineer

One of Jasper’s most beneficial tools is the Academy. It’s a collection of courses that teach users how to use Jasper properly and, by extension, other generative AI tools as well, by becoming a better prompt engineer. The most important thing you have to do to get great results is to write a clear and descriptive prompt. Jasper Academy has plenty of documents that teach you how to write high-quality inputs, as well as tips on creating the best campaigns and using its many tools.

Setting Up Your Brand’s Voice and Knowledge Base

Using generative AI productively boils down to how you phrase your prompts. Jasper, too, will create content based on what you ask and how you ask. 

As you start with Jasper, you should create a Brand Voice. Setting it up is super easy, as you only have to either provide a URL to a relevant piece of text or copy and paste some sample text into Jasper.

Setting up a Brand Voice allows Jasper to create content in that same style and tone. You can also ask the AI tool to create text that’s “witty” or “informative,” or however else you would describe what you want. However, using your own company’s voice is expedient when leveraging Jasper for business purposes. 

Brands can also create a Knowledge Base to give Jasper even more detailed information about products, your company, or relevant people; for instance (the bios, product pages, and other data you put into Jasper to create the Knowledge Base are called Knowledge Assets). That way, when you ask Jasper to write a list of topic ideas for YouTube videos for a certain product, the AI knows what you’re talking about and can create error-free copy. 

As a test, I created a couple of Knowledge Base entries by feeding Jasper the URLs for the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15. I asked Jasper to compare the two devices by using the two links. It gave me a thorough comparison between the two devices, as you can see in the image below. 

(Credit: Jasper/PCMag)

Templates for a Variety of Business Needs

You can also use one of the many business-driven templates Jasper provides to create content to suit your needs. Jasper has templates for Amazon product descriptions, product features, company bios for your site, email subject lines that people will want to actually open, FAQ pages, and marketing angles for your brand, to name a very few. 

Other templates are more fun to use. Creative Story, for instance, can give you pretty hilarious concepts. I asked it to write a crossover short story between Alice in Wonderland and Supernatural, the CW show, and the results were more than amusing. While Alice is a character that Jasper clearly knows, somehow, pop culture completely escapes the AI. “All seemed lost until Sam used his supernatural powers to create a portal back home for himself, Dean, and Alice before disappearing into thin air without saying goodbye,” is one line Jasper wrote. Props for getting the Winchester brothers’ names correct.

There’s also a template called “Explain it to a child,” where you input text and a school grade level, and Jasper simplifies the text for that reading ability. I used the introduction text from Wikipedia on auroras to test it, and I must say, it’s quite well done. In the image below, the top answer on the right side is for a 12th-grade reading level, followed by 8th-grade and 4th-grade copy.

(Credit: Jasper/PCMag)

Writer’s Block

If you’re facing writer’s block, you can have Jasper generate ideas for you. By using the template for Blog Post Topic Ideas and inputting the company name, product description, and audience, you can get a bunch of cool ideas on what stories to tackle. 

If you want to create SEO-friendly content, Jasper has a few templates for that, too. Some are obvious because they use “SEO” in the name, while others are more difficult to track. The Content Rewriter template, for instance, lets you copy and paste any text you want to optimize. Then, if you ask Jasper to focus on a specific keyword, it will do just that. 

Using Jasper as a Chatbot

Another thing you can do is use Jasper as a chatbot. This feature is easy to access and comprehensively answers your questions. 

According to a company representative, Jasper uses a range of AI models, with GPT-4 being just one of them. The company would not provide more detail.

(Credit: Jasper/PCMag)

I asked Jasper which phone has the best camera. You can choose between a speedy answer and one that’s top quality. I picked the latter, and that’s exactly what I got. Jasper provided a list of the top phones, complete with reference links and comprehensive, full-fledged footnotes, so I could follow up on each source. Bing Chat equally attributes all its sources. Google Bard mostly cites its sources, though it’s not consistent.

A Writing Test

I decided to test Jasper, Google Bard, and ChatGPT by asking them to perform the same task: “Write a 250-word blog post on the impact of AI in education.”

In its response to the command, Jasper highlights various implementations of artificial intelligence in education, mentioning how students can receive personalized learning plans to suit their needs and capabilities better while teachers benefit from help with grading and task assessment. Language learning and translation are also easier with AI. Jasper fails to point out any troubles professors face with students who use AI to write essays or complete homework assignments that are subpar in quality, unedited, and have loads of errors or hallucinations.

(Credit: Jasper/PCMag)

ChatGPT’s answer follows the same pattern, mentioning the chance to use AI to personalize the teaching experience for each student while virtual tutors and chatbots offer immediate assistance. The same take on using AI to grade papers is mentioned in this response.

(Credit: OpenAI/PCMag)

While I was hoping for a bit of variety, I didn’t get it from Bard. Google’s tool uses the same pattern, putting the usefulness of AI integration in education at the top. However, Bard mentions some concerns regarding the decrease in human interaction in the classroom and the worsening of educational inequalities, as students from low-income families might lack access to the same AI-powered tools and technologies as their more affluent peers. It may not be a fully comprehensive answer, but it at least shows more than one angle.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

I asked all the chatbots for the sources that led to the creation of their texts, and only Bard provided a list of articles. However, adjusting the prompt to ask for the negative effects of AI in education and quotation of sources fixes the problem across the board. (It’s yet another example of the importance of writing a descriptive and clear prompt.) The downside is that they only gave the names of the sourced articles; you’d need to look them up because the chatbots didn’t include any links.

Marketing Test

In a separate test, I asked Jasper, Chat GPT, and Google Bard to do some marketing campaign work for a tool I made up called ABC AI. 

With Jasper, I created a campaign with this simple overview: “ABC AI is a tool that is meant to help teachers customize their teaching approach for each student’s individual needs.” I asked it to create a bunch of content for me, including a blog post, an FAQ page, a website landing page, and even ads for Google and Facebook. 

It took about a minute, but the campaign page quickly populated with everything I needed. Jasper further offers the chance to create more content, from TikTok scripts to LinkedIn posts to newsletters. 

Even though the prompt was pretty thin, Jasper did a fantastic job creating copy for the brand’s website and the FAQ page. Even the ad ideas were pretty decent. 

(Credit: Jasper/PCMag)

Jasper quickly caught on to what ABC AI was about and made up the entire brand’s purpose. Still, the copy is convincing and cohesive. 

Given the same prompt, ChatGPT got the gist of the made-up brand, as well, offering a landing page full of bullet points.

(Credit: OpenAI/PCMag)

Bard similarly understood the assignment but didn’t deliver a fantastic landing page for the brand. It also overreached in making up some fake testimonials, which, if used for a real product, could put a company into trouble, legally speaking.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

The beauty of Jasper is that I didn’t have to put in any additional prompts for each piece of content I wanted, as they had been created en masse from the start. It’s super efficient and ensures campaign cohesiveness. 

While I created a simple dummy product for Jasper to create all this content, brands can add their real presentations and documentation, giving Jasper more to work with. 

One-Stop Content Shop

Jasper is a valuable one-stop shop for businesses that want to build a cohesive online presence across their websites, press releases, social media content, ads, and so on. If you’re going to use AI in your business for content creation, you should absolutely consider Jasper. Not only does it create above-average copy, but it writes it in your defined style and adjusts for the medium; for all that, it’s an Editors’ Choice winner. As with any AI, however, we encourage human oversight and thorough fact-checking before making any of Jasper’s work public.