Generative AI Applications and Tools
Reading Time: 8 minutes
The list of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) applications, tools and methods grows daily. This is a small selection of those more commonly accessed within each category.
Before you Explore
As you test and experiment with these tools, consider using the below table to evaluate the safety and privacy of the service you’re vetting. Each chatbot will have their own data collection practices. It can be helpful to scan the website, and review terms of use and privacy policy, even if you don’t know all of the jargon. Look for the following criteria, and consider how closely or not they match the ideal. In this section the term “user” refers to you or your students.
| Ask Yourself | Safest | Risky |
|---|---|---|
| Who or what appears to be the primary market? | Post-secondary education or a particular industry. | Heavily advertised products that don’t demonstrate particular use cases or contexts. |
| What kind of information does it collect from you or students? | Ideally, it should be as little as possible, perhaps just your email and name, and for students, little to no information. | Requires extensive information that makes someone personally identifiable, such as their address, phone number, or credit card, or if the service may share this with third parties. |
| What data protection standards is it in compliance with? | GDPR compliant (General Data Protection Regulation, the EU regulations on information privacy). | No noted compliance with standards such as GDPR (EU), AIDA (Canada – in development) PIPEDA (Canada) FERPA (US) |
| Where is data stored? | In Canada. | If this is not specified. |
| Who owns any intellectual property (IP) that is input into or output from the service? | You or the learner should retain any rights to input or output material, and the service should not retain a copy. | Any lack of clarity around who owns the inputs or outputs. Be especially cautious where these may be used to train models, or shared or sold to third-party services. |
| Are you and learners easily able to delete any account? | You should be able to delete your account and associated data easily and quickly. There should be no exit fee to retain anything created using the service. | Any costs associated with exiting the service. |
Many generative AI services might not meet all or many of the ideal answers above. Some might have a combination of ideal answers and red flags, for example. For any help in making this kind of assessment, reach out to the Privacy Office.
Chatbots
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | AI chatbot | Freely chat (limited tokens); sign in optional; monthly Plus, Tem, or enterprise licence API pricing token-based and varies by model | Popularly known chatbot; Turn off conversation history to ensure greater privacy, and use paid service to connect to search engines or access API. Requires sign in for all plans. |
| Microsoft Copilot | AI chatbot integrated into MS365 | Freely available Conestoga has an enterprise license for all employees and students (credentials required | AI chatbot integrated into Bing search and other Microsoft products. Variation of ChatGPT with different chatbot persona, leverages GPT 4. |
| Chatsonic | AI chatbot within writing application (Writesonic) | free limited access; various paid plans for individuals and teams | UAI chat engine within the Writesonic platform, combining models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini with marketing tools. Requiires sign up. |
| Jasper Chat | AI chatbot within writing application (Jasper) | 7 day free tria; Monthly licenses at different levels | AI chatbot feature within the Jasper AI writing platform. Medium to complex conversations; toggle to include Google search data. Retains context but performs with an older dataset. |
| Google Gemini | AI chatbot | Free access to Gemini models; Gemini advanced monthly license (sign in-required) | Google’s conversational AI chatbot. Requires a Google ccount. |
| YouChat | AI chatbot plug-in | Limited basic queries; more tiers at monthly billing | Built into a search engine, so it can provide up-to-date information. Currently integrates images, code and other types of outputs. Sign in required for paid featuers. |
| Perplexity AI | AI chatbot | Unlimited concise searches; limited pro queries. | Cites sources with answers; may copy from sources. Sign in required for pro features and saving history. |
| Claude | AI assistant | free tier with limited usage | Creative tasks; requires an Anthropic account |
Code Generators
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | AI-powered coding assistance | Free limited suggestions; monthly billing for tiers | natural language to code suggest code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor integrates with popular development environments supports wide range of languages organizational policies privacy Requires a GitHub account |
| TabNine | AI-powered coding assistance | Basic code completions; monthly tier licenses available | natural language to code Trained on open source code with permissive licenses whole-line & full-function code completions learns your coding style integrates with popular development environments supports wide range of languages cloud or local storage Requires sign up |
| Replit GhostWriter | AI-powered coding assistance | Free plan limited AI assistance; monthly billed tier options | soon to have GitHub app natural language to code autocomplete prompt driven development production quality code soon to have test generation Requires a Replit account |
| MutableAI | AI-powered tool for code documentation, generation, and understanding | free (manual suggestions, limited queries; monthly tiered options | Medium to complex conversations; toggle to include Google search data. Retains context but performs with an older dataset. Requires sign up. |
| Seek AI for data/SLQ | AI tool for generating code, particularly SQL queries from natural language | Usage-based or tiered pricing | code editor, knowledge base, data warehouse integrations, and more SQL queries without manually generating code |
| AI2SQL | Generates SQL queries from natural language. | 7 day free trial; set numbers of queries per month, depending on subsecription | write complex SQL queries natural language to SQL code Requires sign up |
Graphics and Art Generators
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nightcafe | AI art generator with various models and styles. | Free: 5 welcome credits, then daily free credits; monthly subscription plans | text-to-image generator upload image for style change choice of model: Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, Coherent, Artistic, and Style Transfer; Requires sign-up (e.g., with Google account). |
| Starry AI | Pure Art AI art generator app. | Free Tier: Allows up to 25 artworks daily without watermarks, full ownership; paid plans | full ownership of creations natural or more abstract renders text-to-image generator choice of medium (to match artist or art period) ; requires sign up |
| Fotor | Online photo editor and design maker with AI art generation features. | Fotor Basic (Free): Basic editing, limited templates/effects, limited AI credits, download with watermark; paid plans billed monthly | photo editor + AI art generator + graphics + graphics template library HD capability, stock photos, file management, resizing Sign in required for full features |
| Deep Dream Generator | AI image generator with various artistic styles. | Free Users: Get a small number of images/day (e.g., up to 3); subscriptoin plans or a one-time purchase | expand an image with an art style text-to-image AI art; Sign in required |
| Jasper Art | AI image generation feature within the Jasper platform. | Cost: Included in Jasper’s Pro and Business plan | integrate AI-generated art into copy text-to-image AI art Uses DALL-E 2 model High-resolution 2K pixel images Royalty-free commercial use No watermark |
| Rytr | Art Generator with AI Writing Tools | Free Plan: 10k characters/month, access to 40+ use-cases, limited image generation; subscription plans | text-to-image AI art upload an image for the AI to create variations add or remove shadows and object to create a more realistic image requires sign up |
| DALL-E 2 | AI systems by OpenAI that create realistic images and art from natural language descriptions. DALL-E 3 is the more advanced version. | Often accessed via ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) which includes DALL-E 3 image generation; cost per image resolution | Cites sources with answers; may copy from sources; requires an Open AI account |
| Midjourney | AI image generator known for its artistic and high-quality outputs, primarily accessed via Discord | Subscription based; no free version beyond occasional trials | Requires a Discord account and subscription to Midjourney. |
| Stable Diffusion | Open-source deep learning, text-to-image model. Can be run locally or accessed via various platforms and APIs. | Free to download and run if you have the hardware; API access monthly subscription | text to image AI art image to image AI art no personal information required; Widely available in various forms. The original “free” is true for the model itself, but using it via hosted services or APIs incurs costs. |
| Adobe Firefly | Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models, integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud apps (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Express) and available as a standalone web app. | Limited generative credits; Firefly stand alone plans billed monthly | in beta image and video creation ; Requires an Adobe ID |
| Canva | AI-driven tools | Free version with limited features; pro monthly costs | Requires Canva account |
| Mistral AI | AI-images | Limited images with free acount | Requires Mistral AI account |
Miscellaneous
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roblox Code Assist | AI-powered code completion feature within Roblox Studio. | Appears to be a free feature integrated into Roblox Studio for developers. There’s a daily cap on AI suggestions. | AI assistant in Studio Script Editor |
| TL:DR | AI tool for summarizing articles and text. | Free unlimited basic summaries (key sentences), 10 advanced AI summaries (one-time), limited paraphrases, browser extensions; monthly subscription or pay as you go | get summary of any YouTube Video ree to use with limitations; sign-up required for full features and paid plans. |
Research
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| elicit | AI research assistant that helps automate literature reviews, find papers, summarize information, and extract data from papers | Unlimited search, limited summaries/chat with papers (4 at a time), extract data from 20 papers/month; monthly subscription options | research assistant using language models uses semantic similarity, which finds papers related to your question even if they don’t use the same keywords search forwards and backwards in the citation graph Requires sign-in |
| consensus | AI search engine for scientific research, providing evidence-based answers by analyzing peer-reviewed papers. | Free unlimited searches, AI-powered filters, limited access to GPT-4 summaries, Consensus Meter, etc. (20 AI credits/month); monthly subscription options | uses AI to instantly extract and aggregate scientific findings related to a user’s query Requires sign in for premium features |
| ResearchRabbit | A citation-based literature mapping tool that helps researchers discover and visualize relevant papers and authors. | Free. Described as “Free Forever.” | “Spotify” for papers personalized collections interactive visualizations. Requires account creation. |
| ConnectedPapers | A tool to visually explore academic papers in a graph, showing connections through citations | 5 free graphs per month, all features included; monthly subscription options | visual tool find and explore papers relative to discipline based on Co-citation and Bibliographic Coupling Requires sign-up (email, Google, or ORCID |
| Penelope AI | AI-powered Markdown editor and writing assistant for improving writing, rewriting, summarizing, and paraphrasing. | Free Tier/Trial: Allows users to start writing and explore features for free. | ensure manuscripts meet journal requirements 30+ checks … currently specific journals |
| Inciteful | A tool to build a network of academic papers from a seed paper, analyzing citation networks to discover relevant literature. | Free | search engine for academic papers build literature map (links to Litmaps); sign in required to save work and manage paper networks. |
| Litmaps | An interactive platform for visualizing and managing literature reviews using citation networks. | Free basic search (up to 20 inputs), 2 Litmaps, 100 articles per map; monthly subscription options | seed, discover, map academic papers |
| Scite | An AI-powered research platform that helps researchers discover and evaluate scientific articles by showing how they have been cited (supporting, contrasting, mentioning). | 7-day free trial; monthly subscription | – browser extension – compares how many other published research papers support or refute a paper – identifies how many citations a paper has received – use natural language to search for research papers – drafting of papers |
Teaching, Learning, and Assessment
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Tutor Pro | AI tutor | Free; no sign in | This tool is part of the Contact North AI tool suite and is designed to assist faculty in designing assessments, rubrics, and learning outcomes. It is free and browser-based |
| AI Teaching Assistant Pro | AI faculty assistant | Free; no sign in | Another tool from the Contact North suite, AI Tutor Pro helps with tutoring and academic support. It is also free and browser-based |
| EdPlus AI Tools | AI faculty assistant | Free; no sign in | Offered by Arizona State University, this suite includes a Question Generator, Rubric Generator, and Script Voiceover, designed to enhance digital teaching and learning |
| SMARTIE (Strategic Module Assistant for Rubrics, Tasks, and Inclusive Education) | AI faculty assistant | Free; no sign in | Seven assistants designed to help faculty create equitable, accessible, and inclusive learning environments. |
User Experience
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uizard | AI-powered UI design tool for creating wireframes, mockups, and prototypes from text, sketches, or screenshots. | free pro business | turn hand-drawn sketch into UX design Requires sign in |
| Galileo AI | AI tool for generating UI designs from text and image prompts, exportable to Figma and code (HTML/Tailwind). | Free 3 AI generations/month, 2 projects, 10 free templates. | requires sign in |
| syntheticUsers | User research AI tool | Free for 30 days | Tests ideas/products with AI participants for product discovery. Requires sign in |
| Looppanel | AI-powered research analysis and repository tool for user interviews (records, transcribes, AI notes).l | not free; monthly license | assistant for user research records your calls, transcribes them, and centralizes all your research data in one place |
| Sprig | Product research platform for capturing and analyzing user feedback via in-product surveys, prototype tests, and AI analysis. | free limited features; pro monthly license | collect targeted user insights identify common themes in feedback |
Writing Generators and Paraphrasing Tools
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sudowrite | AI writing partner primarily aimed at fiction authors and screenwriters. | Free trial available; Monthly license options | generate content rewrite existing content into something new elaborate on something when you need more words brainstorm ideas multiple languages won’t plagiarize unless forces (against terms of service) |
| Rytr | AI writing tool focused on maintaining the user’s unique voice and providing transparent AI processes. | Free to 10k words; monthly license beyond tha | 40+ use cases 30+ languages 20+ tones plagiarism checker image generation |
| Chibi AI | AI writing tool focused on maintaining the user’s unique voice and providing transparent AI processes | Platform access, market rates for AI model usage | creativity modes / dynamic style adapting built-in Grammarly expert mode specialized writing tools custom templates Require google ccount and an OpenRouter account for API key |
| Paragraph AI | AI writing assistant available as apps and browser extensions for tasks like creating, fixing, replying to, and editing text | 5 free uses of main features per day, basic editing, basic keyboard, 1000 character input limit; Student or professional license | Chrome plug in: one selection to write content 30+ languages Grammar checker Plagiarism checker Instant replies |
| Copy AI | AI writing tool for generating various types of marketing copy, blog content, emails, and more. | Free to 2K words; pro or unlimited monthly license | 90+ copywriting tools unlimited projects 25+ languages wizards |
| Quillbot | AI-powered paraphrasing tool, grammar checker, summarizer, citation generator, and plagiarism checker. | Free limited use (e.g., 125 words in Paraphraser, limited modes, 1 Freeze Word, 1,200 words in Summarizer); premium or unlimited monthly licenses | Apps & Browser Extensions (Chrome + Word plug-in) paraphrasing ——— grammar checker plagiarism checker co-writer summarizer citation generator translator |
| Wordtune | AI writing assistant that helps rephrase sentences, adjust tone, summarize text, and improve clarity. | Free limited daily/monthly uses (e.g., 10 rewrites/day, 3 AI summaries/month). Premium (unlimited rewrites) | Apps & Browser Extensions (Chrome, Edge, Word plug-in) ———— shorten/expand paragraph rewrites |
| Grammarly | AI-powered writing assistant that checks grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery. Offers generative AI features as well. | Free basic writing suggestions: Licensed by college: free for all employees and students | audience-specific tone & style guide while writing proof-reading … grammar, spelling, punctuation, style suggestions long-form content editor Licensed version has no GrammarlyGO (generative AI) |
