Poe, Quora’s subscription-based, cross-platform aggregator of AI-powered chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, has launched a feature called Previews that lets users create interactive apps directly in chats with chatbots.
The Previews feature lets Poe users create data visualizations, games, and even drum machines by typing things like “Analyze the information in this report and turn it into an easy-to-understand, interactive presentation to help me understand it.” Apps can be built using multiple chatbots (e.g., Meta’s Llama 3 and GPT-4o) and leverage information from uploaded files including videos, and can be shared with anyone via a link.
Previews are very similar to Anthropic’s recently introduced Artifacts , dedicated workspaces where users can edit and add AI-generated content like code and documents. But Artifacts are limited to Anthropic’s templates, while Previews support HTML output — with CSS and Javascript functionality for now (and more to come, Quora promises) — from any chatbot.
Quora says Previews works best with chatbots that “excel” at programming, like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro.
This reporter was unable to test building an app using Previews, which requires a $20 monthly payment for Poe’s premium plan. But A few Demos around the world wide web —Simple demos, albeit made by Poe’s team—work roughly as advertised.
The previews arrive at a somewhat awkward time for Bo; an investigation by Wired Last month, Poe was found to have allowed users to download paid articles from news publications on demand. Wired claims it was able to obtain copies of stories from publishers like The New York Times and The Atlantic using Quora’s internal Assistant chatbot.
Quora has questioned this belief, and continues to question it, pointing out that it was wrong.
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