Poe, an app created by Quora, now allows users to create their own chatbots by using prompts combined with an existing bot, such as ChatGPT, as a base. The app, which was launched in February, is Quora’s latest product and aims to tap into the potential of chatbots in the future of web search and Q&A. Poe initially debuted with support for a few general knowledge chatbots, including Sage, Dragonfly, and Claude, powered by OpenAI and Anthropic technologies. It has now rolled out subscriptions that allow users to access more powerful bots based on new language models such as GPT-4 and Claude+. Users can access the bots via Poe’s iOS app or Android app on the mobile web or via its desktop web interface.
With Poe’s new feature, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo explained in a recent Twitter thread, users can make their own bots based on either Claude or ChatGPT.
“We’ve seen a lot of great experimentation with prompts on LLMs both among the community on Poe and across the internet, and it’s amazing how much value prompting can unlock from language models,” D’Angelo wrote. “We hope this new feature can help people who are talented at prompting share their ability with the rest of the world, and provide simple interfaces for everyone to get the most out of AI,” he said.
Moreover, Poe will now offer users the ability to create their own bots using prompts, allowing them to direct the bots to perform highly specific tasks. The idea behind this is that better prompts lead to better outputs, and this has led to a new creator class in the field of prompt engineering. Online communities have also emerged, enabling people to share their prompt ideas. Quora plans to cover all the costs involved with operating this feature, including the LLM fees, but there are platform guidelines restricting the use of bots for hate speech, violence, illegal activities, fraud, IP infringement, and other problematic use cases.
While Poe is not the only app catering to mobile users, its consumer demand has been high. The mobile app version of Poe has 1.17 million installs and has generated $520,000 in gross revenue, according to data.ai. Quora plans to offer bot creators feedback on how people are using their bot so that they can iterate on improvement. Additionally, the company plans to develop an API that will allow anyone to host a bot from a server they operate, potentially creating a new business opportunity.
