There are a wide variety of AI tools available to use, covering a wide range of functions, and the number is growing all the time. This page is therefore not intended to be an exhaustive list of AI chatbots, but an overview of the most common / popular ones and ones you may be recommended.
As always please remember AI use is determined by your course, so check with your tutor and assignment brief before utilising any AI tools. The University is utilising a traffic light system for assignments, which will indicate to you the level of acceptable AI use, if any.
Please also be aware of issues surrounding data protection and AI. There are ongoing concerns over data protection when using AI tools. This is because there is no way of knowing what information may be stored and used in training the AI tool. Therefore do not share any confidential or private information about yourself or others. Do check if there is an option opt out of data collection.
Avoid using your University email address to register for non-work-related websites and systems. Where this is unavoidable never use your University password. If an external website is compromised your credentials may be stolen and used to gain access to University systems.
A prompt is a form of interaction between a human and a large language model. This could be a question, a statement or instruction. The more detailed prompts receive better responses. Please see the page on using AI ethically for more information on how to create prompts.
Microsoft Copilot is an AI tool designed by Microsoft and part of Bing. Copilot is the preferred AI tool by the university due to its data privacy.
There are two versions; the web version and a version built into Microsoft 365. Students and staff at the University only have access to the web version.
Microsoft Copilot essentially works like ChatGPT or Google Gemini and can;
And more.
There are different options under conversation style, for an academic format, select the precise option
For a comprehensive list of features, see the Microsoft website. 
ChatGPT3.5 is an LLM designed as a chatbot; it allows you to have human like conversations and can do things like answer questions and compose text such as emails, code or essays.
One of the things to remember with ChatGPT (and other Large Language Models) is that they do not 'understand' in a traditional sense. Using data it has gathered, it is 'guessing' what the most likely series of words will be in an answer, based on the prompt you have put in.
Limitations of ChatGPT
Google Gemini is an experimental chatbot developed by Google, which works much like ChatGpt. You can use Gemini to;
It does come with the same potential issues as ChatGPT, but one advantage is that as it runs from Google, it harvests data in real time, as opposed to ChatGPT which was last updated in 2021.
