Skip to Main Content

Beginner's Guide to Generative AI: GenAI Tools for Research and Learning

Image Generation Tools

Writing Assistants

Paperpal

Paperpal is a writing assistant that specializes in academic writing and research. It includes a manuscript checker that reports on submission-readiness.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a grammar checking tool that also provides feedback on tone, voice and writing style.

QuillBot

Quillbot specializes in paraphrasing and condensing large quantities of text. It also includes a grammar checker, a citation generator and translator.

Yoodli

Yoodli provides practice sessions for presentations and interviews. While practicing, users receive real-time feedback to improve their communication skills.

Research Assistants

Perplexity.ai

Perplexity is a conversational search engine that cites and links all of its sources. It indexes the web daily which allows its responses to be up-to-date.

Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar is an academic search engine that provides links to papers along with a summary of their content. The semantic scholar database includes over 200 million scholarly works and continues to grow.

Consensus

Consensus uses the Semantic Scholar dataset. When given a yes or no question, it can determine the answer based on consensus in the research.

Litmaps

When given a starting paper, Litmaps recommends more relevant articles by providing a network visualization of scholarly works that have been cited or referenced.

Notebook LM 

Notebook LM is a research assistant that organizes text and finds key insights from notes or data.

Elicit 

Elicit speeds up the literature review process by summarizing the main findings from multiple academic papers. Users can quickly see what matters most.

ChatPDF 

ChatPDF lets users upload PDFs and interact with the content. It also generates clear summaries and compares documents 

Research Rabbit 

Research Rabbit helps organize, share, and explore collections of papers. When a starting paper is selected, it recommends related works automatically. 

ScholarAI 

ScholarAI is a research assistant that finds and organizes relevant papers. It also shares snippets from credible sources.

Julius AI 

Julius AI is a research assistant that analyzes and visualizes data by allowing users to chat with datasets, ask questions, and generate clear visualizations. 

Scite 

Scite is a research tool that helps users understand the context of a citation and shows whether an article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. 

Litmaps

Using a network of cited papers, Litmaps help users find the most relevant papers on a specific topic.

Consensus

Consensus is a search engine that finds relevant papers from a database of over 200 million studies. 

Coding Assistants

GitHub Copilot

Copilot uses ChatGPT's code generation features but with additional functionality through GitHub. It can create and complete code as well as provide suggestions for improving it within the GitHub platform.

Amazon Q Developer

Q Developer can create and complete code. It is specialized to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Codeium

Codeium is a plug-in that can be added to many Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Its features include autocompletion, natural language commands, and chatbot assistance.

Cody

Cody is an assistant that specializes in understanding the context of the code you are working on by accessing your entire codebase.

Code Llama 

Code Llama specializes in writing, fixing and explaining code in multiple programming languages, It can generate solutions and explain them step by step.

Other Tools

The AI tool landscape is constantly evolving and the tools noted above are just a few of those available.  Many more tools can be explored through the Ithaka AI product tracker.

The Ithaka list is not comprehensive but focuses on tools used in academe.  It may be most useful to search it for particular tools (using your browser's Find function), or for casual browsing in a particular category.

Image Generation Tools

MidJourney

MidJourney turns text prompts into high-quality images and videos.

Firefly 

Firefly is Adobe’s creative AI design tool. It generates images and videos from text