By: Paul DelSignore
The Universal AI Messaging Client
Having been spearheaded by ChatGPT, the new age of AI chatbots has arrived, and they are everywhere.
From ChatGPT-4 in Bing to Google’s Bard, to Anthropic’s Claude, the bots are finding their lanes, but it’s not always easy for users to leverage each of these chatbots, considering they are accessible in different places.
What if you could access all your bots from one place?
Quora’s AI Chatbot Poe
If you are unfamiliar with Quora, it is a social question-and-answer platform, and the team at Quora has been developing an application named Poe which stands for “Platform for Open Exploration.”
The purpose of Poe is to simplify the usage of bots by integrating them into a single platform.
Poe takes some of the popular bots like ChatGPT, Claude, GPT-4, and Sage and makes them accessible so that you can easily switch back and forth between bots.
Why would you want to switch between chatbots?
because chatbots have different personalities and some are better at providing specific types of answers than others.
Here are the differences (via Poe’s documentation):
- Claude-instant tends to be better at many creative writing tasks and tends to give longer and more in-depth answers. Compared to the previously available Claude, Claude-instant is faster and significantly better at non-English languages.
- Claude+ is significantly better than Claude-instant at complex and difficult tasks. Similar to Claude-Instant, it is particularly strong at creative writing and providing detailed responses.
- Sage and ChatGPT tend to be better at languages other than English and are better at programming-related tasks.
- Dragonfly tends to have shorter responses, and it can be easier to get Dragonfly to follow instructions when given examples in the input.
- GPT-4 is a major advance relative to ChatGPT and is the most powerful language model available to the world today. It is particularly strong at creative writing, problem-solving (e.g. math and physics), and instruction following.
The objective for Poe is to not only provide a single access point but also ensure accessibility from any device, something not all bots can achieve effectively, particularly on mobile devices.
So Poe is also available today on iOS via an iPhone app (Android to come), and you can access it both on the desktop and the iPhone.
Create Your Own ChatBot With Poe
A cool feature that was just released is the ability to create your own bot that is tuned for either Claude or ChatGPT.
In this example, I created a bot called ‘The Yoda Bot’ and instructed it to answer all questions like Yoda would.
What’s amazing is each bot you create gets an easy-to-share URL at ‘poe.com/botname’ so you can share this bot with anyone.
You can access this Yoda bot here:
https://poe.com/TheYodaBot
Here are some other examples:
- poe.com/PirateBot (talks like a pirate)
- poe.com/japanesetutor (explains how to say things in Japanese)
- poe.com/emojis (translates your messages to emoji)
- poe.com/RoastMaster (slights you in entertaining ways)
- poe.com/chefbot (given ingredients, suggests a recipe)
Of course, this is just a basic example, but you can add more complexity to it by providing more detailed prompts.
Additionally, you can fine-tune a custom bot using the API option (coming soon).
Note that creating a bot through this method just requires writing a natural language text prompt and does not require any programming. We are separately developing an API that will allow anyone to host a bot from a server they operate, which will allow more complex bots.
- Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora
What about Pricing?
For the most part, Poe is free to use. Meaning most of the bots, including Claude-instant, ChatGPT, Sage, and Dragonfly, as well as the ones you create, are covered by Quora.
However, if you want access to GPT-4 or Claude+, they require a subscription cost of $9.99 per month.
Final Thoughts
There’s a lot to like about Poe.
Single access to multiple bots to switch from, an easy and friendly user experience, customizing your own bot, multi-device access, and it’s mostly free to use.
In an age of AI-powered large-language chatbots, we will continue to see a multitude of bots coming to market, and it will be a challenge to manage access to all the bots.
Poe is an interesting new platform that may just offer that solution.
