Poe, Quora's subscription-based, cross-platform aggregator for AI-powered chatbots like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4o, has introduced a feature called “Previews” that permits users to construct interactive apps directly in chats with chatbots.
Previews let Poe users create data visualizations, games, and even drum machines by typing things like “analyze the data on this report and switch it into a transparent and interactive presentation that can help me understand it.” The apps may be built using multiple chatbot (equivalent to Meta's Llama 3 and GPT-4o) and pull information from uploaded files, including videos, and be shared with anyone via a link.
Previews are very much like Anthropic's recently introduced Artifacts, dedicated workspaces where users can edit and add to AI-generated content equivalent to code and documents. However, Artifacts is restricted to Anthropic's models, while Previews supports HTML output – currently with CSS and Javascript functionality (and more in the longer term, Quora guarantees) – from any chatbot.
According to Quora, Previews works best with chatbots which have excellent programming skills, equivalent to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Google Gemini 1.5 Pro.
This reporter was unable to check the creation of an app with previews since it requires paying $20 per thirty days for Poe’s premium plan. But the few Demos around The network – albeit easy demos created by the Poe team – work roughly as advertised.
The previews come at a somewhat inopportune time for Poe; an investigation by Wired Last month, it emerged that Poe was allowing users to download paid articles from news publications on request. Wired claims he managed to acquire copies of articles from publishers equivalent to the New York Times and The Atlantic using Quora's in-house Assistant chatbot.
Quora denied – and still denies – that it was unsuitable.
