There is now daily help for those struggling to complete Wordle. The New York Times, which bought the game last year, has turned to AI to encourage players along the way. Since the game launched in October 2021, players have tried to guess the first word, ending up with blank tiles.

However, The New York Times’ WordleBot found ‘Crane’ to be the best place to start while ‘Crate’, ‘Slate’, ‘Slant’ and ‘Trace’ are also very good guesses, as are ‘Lance’, ‘Carte’, ‘Least’ and ‘Trice’. But this AI player’s starting word ‘Crane’ has never been the correct answer to Wordle.

Explaining their work, New York Times said: “WordleBot solves the 2,309 possible Wordles using the fewest number of guesses when it starts with ‘Crane’ in normal mode and ‘Dealt’ in hard mode”, a version of Wordle where “any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses. “This may surprise some readers who have seen, in various places across the Internet, people claim that words like ‘Irate’, ‘Salet’ or ‘Raise’ are the best openers.

The truth is that it depends exactly how you’re playing and whether you are a human or a computer,” the post continued. “We hope the bot’s advice will help you think about Wordle more analytically, which will help you get better at solving the puzzles in the long run,” continues The New York Times.

“In addition, it may serve as a tiebreaker of sorts for those of you involved in competitive text chains with friends and family. If you did everything right and were simply unlucky, it will tell you that too,” The New York Times encouraged.