Integrated AI Assistants are built into trusted academic databases, publisher platforms, and library resources to help researchers find, summarise, and interact with scholarly content more efficiently. They can improve access to licensed and paywalled materials provided by the library.
Making use of the AI features within databases offers a safer search space than other types of AI research tools. Access is via your university login credentials, so you don't have to sign up using your personal data. Not only do they offer greater data protection, but they are more likely to be a sustainable solution, whereby the AI assistant is limited to searching within the content provided by the database itself, rather than trawling the web. This means that, in most cases, the results could be little different than a traditional search using keywords, but the summaries provide added context around the sources.
Most AI assistants use natural language searching rather than keywords, offering an alternative to find relevant material. As AI continues to evolve, we will likely see these assistants become standard features across library search tools.