#21 - 3 new chatbots this week!

#21 - 3 new chatbots this week!

ChatGPT has competition! This week we've (finally!) seen Google's Bard released in Europe and Anthropic's Claude 2.0 released (UK & US only so far). And Meta has also announced Llama 2 for researchers and enterprises - a free AI with a huge dataset to compete with ChatGPT and others. Both Bard and Claude offer alternatives to personal use AI's such as ChatGPT and are definitely tools to add to your AI toolbox. Read on for more on these 3 tools and other recent news...


Bard is now available in Ireland and the rest of Europe after a delay while Google were apparently dealing with issues with the Irish Data Protection Commission. It has been released with some new features:

  • Pinning and renaming conversations:?Users will be able to save and revisit old prompts by selecting the option to pin - great for developing ideas over a longer timeframe..
  • Exporting code to more places:?Users will now be able to export Python code to Replit.
  • Sharing responses with friends:?Bard can now create shareable links that you can send to others to show off a chat.
  • Using images in your prompts:?Bard can now use Google Lens to analyse images. Users can search for more information about the image or ask for captions.

My first impressions are good - it runs quickly, seems to give detailed answers and you can build up multiple prompts to refine and expand on earlier answers in more detail. Chats are shareable (at the bottom there's an icon to share the link to either one question or your entire chat) - here's an example of a series of increasingly detailed questions I asked Bard to answer to outline a possible book I'm currently working on around accessibility, UDL and AI - https://g.co/bard/share/1ba8b1e35b4f

I was impressed at how it managed to access the accessibility and UDL information and then enable me to link the two together in a table. The data was also then offered as a 1 button export into Google Sheets which offers more analysis functionality so that was a nice touch...


Claude 2.0 is Anthropic's chatbot, and it offers some compelling reasons to take a good look at what it can do. Claude 2 has several advantages over ChatGPT, BUT it's not yet available in Ireland - when I tried logging in I got put on a waitlist to be notified when it's released, so looks like it's in the same problem space as Bard was until recently :( . However, if you are in the UK or US you can try it out now... or, as I have done, just log in with a VPN and connect to a UK or US server and then you're in!

  1. It’s completely free to use with no limits, while ChatGPT requires a paid subscription plan starting at $20 per month for heavy usage.
  2. Claude 2 has been trained on data from 2023, while ChatGPT’s knowledge cuts off in 2021.
  3. Claude 2 can process a context of up to 75,000 words - you can load a long document or book into it and then analyse the contents for instance.
  4. Fourthly, Claude 2 has superior coding abilities (or so it claims).
  5. Claude 2 has more affordable API pricing.

There's a good article outlining all the features at https://www.anthropic.com/index/claude-2

Using Claude with a class...

One really clever feature of Claude 2 is that you can upload up to 5 documents of up to 10Mb each, and Claude will read through the and use the contents in your chats. I uploaded a document outlining a case study for one of my project management classes, and we then asked Claude to generate a project plan, risk analysis, stakeholder list - even a recommended project manager - and it used information from the case study a well as other material on project management to come up with some excellent answers. What I'm finding in such classes as a good strategy to build learning is to have the students do say creating a risk analysis themselves in teams (offline - not using any AI!) and bringing them back to present and discuss their findings, and then asking them to go back and try using AI to help, and then compare and reflect on the different responses and materials surfaced. Sometimes the AI offers new stuff they hadn't though of, but sometimes not - it's always a good critical thinking exercise.

Using conversation prompts in textbooks:

Create your own AI - Saga. https://saga.so/.

This is going to be a thing very soon for all of us, whether we use the impending Microsoft CoPilot technology or create our own personal data sets that AI's can reference. All your data, contacts, emails, documents can be used by personal AI tools such as Saga and others to create a personal assistant. I suspect that in a few years this will be just how things are done...


Advanced ChatGPT Prompts for Teachers and Instructors — Educraft ( Theodosis Karageorgakis )

An excellent article with some great prompt advice for creating teaching materials using ChatGPT and other chatbots...

And 5 Useful ChatGPT Plugins For Students

New tool for summarising papers - Petal


AI news...


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Joe Houghton?is an Assistant Professor at UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business where he directs the MSc programmes in Project Management. After a career in IT in multinationals, Joe switched into a portfolio career of University teaching, management coaching and training.


He has authored 5 books to date including "Innovative teaching with AI: Creative approaches to enhancing learning in education", and "Project Management made easy...: the ECCSR approach".

Contact Joe on email at?[email protected]?for any requests for training, seminars, workshops or keynote speaking.

Matt Antony

Create and build anything for your buisness with AI Team Automations. 3 hour fast-track AI Team For Business Automations Workshop On The Way. No coding needed. Lock in the skillset to own your buisness online.

1 年

Cluade 2 is Amazing - despite the mistakes in references - it creates amazing content, just make sure your check the references and content for mistakes. I have tried coding with a Python extension - I do not think it is quite there yet for beginner coders, you need to know your stuff in order for it outputs any great code you can rely on and even that is just the foundation - I think chatbot is the king in this area. Has it come to content? It is amazing. I am trying a new thing today by analyzing a set of data courses through pdfs that I have merged and compressed the data due to 10 MB limitations and later on see if I can automate with an API and aggregated content to create great content and so on. Hope Cluade 2 gets better. I know there are even better ones now, but still not there yet as they still need to be trained.

Elizabeth Hitches

PhD Candidate at the University of Queensland

1 年

Thanks for these really useful updates! I hadn't heard about this! I learn so much from your posts!!!

Theodosis Karageorgakis

AI & eLearning geek. I empower Learning Designers & Teachers to create impact and become more productive in no time.

1 年

Thank you for adding my post on the list!!!

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