Welcome to day fifteen of the 2023 Appvent calendar where today we will focus on a superb text GPT interface, primarily because of its brilliant voice chat interface. It is of course Pi from Inflection AI.

As you’ll have read on the previous day’s posts, with the furore around the usefulness of AI within EdTech, we decided this year to focus our Appvent calendar on AI with a #24DaysOfAI event. For all the conversations and shares on the calendar, please check out the hashtag on LinkedIn and X/Twitter.

Our AI tool of the day:

Pi is a simply superb chatbot. Of all the chatbots I’ve used, it has the quickest and best interaction, response, and measured knowledgebase.

Pi is available both in a browser and as an app on your iPhone and Android. As an AI chatbot, Pi is aware and is very conversational in how it interacts with you. It’s also great and encouraging to see a chatbot that embraces diversity and is upfront about its user privacy and transparency around those things:

Educational Benefits:

Not a tool for younger students as Pi acknowledges, it is more suited to older teens and adults. With that in mind, I thought I’d share how I’ve been using it for some time now, and that is in the role of coach. When you first load up Pi, it asks you what kind of support you’d like to receive:

Of course, you don’t need to choose any of these, you can just talk to it and tell it what you’re keen to explore. On the one hand, it’s been a useful physiotherapy coach for my mother with her rheumatoid arthritis. For me, it’s been a good motivational coach for my health and fitness. The brilliant audio interface and speed of response make it (although it’s free so I don’t have to pay anything for it) significantly better than the chat interface on ChatGPT Plus (albeit the chat interface is also now available for free on ChatGPT too).

Practical Application:

To learn about the tool for teachers, I’ve role-played a variety of scenarios as a teacher, and middle and senior leader and have found Pi to be very useful in all those scenarios.

Of the three tests I did the responses that I found most interesting, and useful, were those when I asked it to coach me. My favourite coaching session was one where I asked it to coach me and go through some role plays with me on some difficult conversation scenarios. Pi was superb. Not only was the tool able to give me some great advice and pointers, but it also gave me great feedback and food for thought on my responses.

Whether you want to have a sensitive conversation with Pi about any issue impacting your professional or personal life, Pi has a brilliant bedside manner and engages with you on a deep level with real-time access to the internet to bring you the latest information. It’s great.

To give you an idea of the sort of conversation, interface, and feedback you get, I thought it would be fun to tell Pi about our Appvent calendar, #24DaysOfAI, and to see what it thought. Here’s what it had to say:

So, whilst Pi might not be suitable for making lesson resources, or for your students to use, as a personal support tool, coach, and ideas generator, Pi has a multitude of uses that I think are of significant benefit to those working in education, whether you’re a teacher, middle, senior or executive leader.

Considerations and Tips:

When integrating any new tool into our educational environment, it’s essential to thoroughly evaluate its application scenarios and the nature of the data it will handle. Before adopting or making any recommendation, consult your Data Protection Officer (as we are sure you always do) to conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment, helping to guarantee compliance and safeguarding before its implementation.

Learn more about Pi and Inflection by visiting their website, checking out their social media, access Pi in the browser here, or downloading the app from the App Store here or the Google Play store here.

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