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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Enhance your productivity with our advanced AI tools—AURA and Microsoft Copilot. These services streamline tasks, improve efficiency, and support your everyday activities.

Featured Services

Overview

Automated University Response Assistant (AURA) is a platform that empowers you to build custom AI solutions in minutes.

  • Easy Customization—AURA is a no-code, user-friendly platform that allows users to create and deploy AI agents in less than 5 minutes without technical knowledge or third-party vendors.
  • Comprehensive Support—AURA provides 24/7 support to York’s students, faculty, and staff.
  • Educational Innovation—Supports instructors with course design and delivery, merging AI innovation with education.
  • Advanced Technology—Combines pre-trained language models with advanced indexing technology to securely and efficiently access external information.
  • Enhanced Security—Utilizes multiple in-house servers to ensure robust data protection and maintain personal information privacy.

Current AURA Agents

  • AL Course Assistant—helps students navigate course logistics and resources.
  • Research GPT—accelerates literature review to support York researchers.
  • OUR Assistant—reduces administrative workload for advising staff using Generative AI-powered Tier-1 email support.
  • SAVY—Our award-winning bilingual GPT-powered AI student virtual assistant.
  • Procurement Optimization—optimizes procurement processes and services with AI.
  • Leonie—supports recruitment and provides assistance for prospective students.
  • LMS Integration—integrates AI into our LMS to help instructors design courses.

Request Access to Aura

Click here for AURA FAQs

Overview

Experience the cutting-edge capabilities of Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant powered by advanced language models. It helps you get better answers, work more efficiently, and unlock your creativity. Currently, Copilot is only available through your browser and does not include the Copilot for Microsoft 365 service that extends to your Microsoft 365 apps.

You can access Copilot through copilot.microsoft.com on modern browsers. Sign in with your Passport York ID to get access and commercial data protection.

  • Enhanced Browsing—navigate the web more efficiently with predictive search results and autofill capabilities.
  • Content Generation—draft emails, documents, and other content directly within the Edge browser with AI-assisted writing tools.
  • Data Protection—Your personal and company data is not shared outside of York.

Click here for Copilot FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

AURA FAQs

No, AURA doesn’t share your information with Microsoft or any other third parties. While AURA uses Microsoft GPT to help generate responses, the data you provide stays with AURA.

Copilot FAQs

No, Microsoft handles all chat data. With commercial data protection enabled, your data isn’t retained or used to train the models.

Commercial Data Protection is a security feature in Microsoft Copilot that ensures our organizational data stays safe. When enabled, it prevents chat data from being stored, shared, or used to train AI models. It’s designed to meet York’s security and compliance needs and safeguard your personal data.

Commercial Data Protection is automatically enabled when you sign in to Copilot using your York account. This ensures that all data processed during your interaction remains secure and is not used for any purpose beyond your specific session. Your data isn’t saved, and no one outside your organization can access it.

No, IT admins can’t monitor or audit your activity or see your search history in Copilot. Microsoft doesn’t retain chat history when commercial data protection is enabled.

No, Copilot doesn’t share your information outside of York.

You can upload files like documents, spreadsheets, and images into Copilot for analysis, summarization, and other tasks. Copilot supports many file types, and your data isn’t stored or used to train the model.

Yes, Copilot works with Microsoft Edge and other major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Yes, Copilot uses Python for data analysis, coding, visualization, and more tasks. It even lets you see the code it generates for these tasks.

No. Currently, YorkU’s Copilot license only covers using the Copilot through your browser, not within M365 applications.

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