Compare AI Tools
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are becoming increasingly important in education, research, and administration. At the University of Minnesota, several AI tools are available to faculty, staff, and students to enhance productivity, creativity, and efficiency.
Understanding Effort Required
Low Effort: Simple prompts, user-friendly interfaces, and quick results with minimal technical skill needed.
Medium Effort: Requires more detailed prompts and some parameter adjustments
High Effort: Involves complex prompt engineering, extensive parameter tuning, significant post-processing, and often technical expertise.
Challenge
Generative AI tools process data using models to produce graphics, written content, summaries, and more. But only certain tools are approved for University of Minnesota data. This comparison can help you decide which approved tool is right for your application.
Other publicly available tools
In addition to the tools listed below, several other generative AI tools are available online (for example, Claude and Perplexity, among others), some with a cost associated with them. These tools are not approved for any institutional data at UMN, even when data is anonymized.
Solutions
The following AI tools have been reviewed and are licensed for systemwide use at the University of Minnesota.
Gemini with Enterprise-Grade Data Protection
Gemini is a generative AI tool that can assist with brainstorming ideas, answering questions, generating content, evaluating or writing code, drafting emails, analyzing data, summarizing information, and more.
Recommended Resources
Effort Required
Key Considerations
- Availability: Faculty, staff, and students
- Core features: Generate text and images, answer questions, summarize or draft content, assist with research and brainstorming, verify responses using Google Search (Double-check feature), create custom AI agents called Gems
- Chat history: Chat history is saved for three months, which includes the Health Care Component (HCC)
- Deep Research: Create reports with uploaded documents and web research. Limited to 10 uses per month, per person
Copilot with Enterprise Data Protection
Microsoft Copilot with enterprise data protection is a generative AI tool.
Recommended Resources
Effort Required
Key Considerations
- Availability: Faculty, staff, students, and group accounts
- Core features: Offers a conversational chat interface designed to enhance productivity and creativity. Using advanced AI, Copilot assists users with generating content, coding, drafting emails, and summarizing information
Minnesota Supercomputing Institute
The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) offers hardware and software with AI capabilities for researchers. It is available at no cost for general access and resources can be leased on an annual basis for dedicated access. The primary users are training and fine-tuning novel AI models for research applications.
Recommended Resources
Effort Required
Key Considerations
- Availability: Researchers and instructors
- Alternative name: Agate cluster
- Core features: GPU servers to power a range of AI or machine learning tasks. Most resources use batch computation; others are reserved for Open OnDemand (OOD)—a web-based interface for remote Linux desktops and Jupyter notebooks
NotebookLM
NotebookLM is a generative AI research assistant. It is available on the web at no cost to all UMN students, faculty, and staff except the Health Care Component. Built on Google's Gemini AI models, NotebookLM allows users to upload their own materials such as PDFs and Google Docs and interact with them by creating summaries, study guides, audio overviews, and more. It is especially useful for synthesizing large volumes of content across multiple documents.
Recommended Resources
Effort Required
Key Considerations
- Availability: Faculty, staff, and students
- Core features: Upload your own documents then ask questions about uploaded content, get summaries, generate study guides and audio overviews, synthesize information across sources, and share notebooks with others.
Zoom AI Companion
The Zoom AI Companion is an opt-in suite of AI tools that enhance meetings before, during, and after you meet. The University has made the following AI Companion tools available:
Recommended Resources
Effort Required
Key Considerations
- Availability: Faculty, staff, and students
- Core features: Zoom AI Companion’s three features provide editable summaries and action items, highlight key moments of engagement, organize the content of a meeting in post, summarize chat content, and recall important topics