Poe, Quora's subscription-based cross-platform aggregator that aggregates AI-powered chatbots such as Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4o, has launched a feature called Previews that allows users to create interactive apps directly by chatting with the chatbot.
Preview allows Poe users to build 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 that's easy to understand.” The app can be built with multiple chatbots (such as Meta's Llama 3 and GPT-4o), and can pull information from uploaded files, including videos, and share them with anyone via a link.
Preview is very similar to Anthropic's recently introduced Artifacts, a dedicated workspace where users can edit and add to AI-generated content like code and documentation. However, while Artifacts is limited to Anthropic's models, Preview supports HTML output from any chatbot (currently supporting CSS and Javascript features, with more to come in the future, as Quora promises).
An example of a drum machine created using Poe's preview feature. Image credit: Quora
According to Quora, Previews works best with well-programmed chatbots, such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro.
This reporter wasn't able to test building an app with Previews, which requires paying $20 per month for Poe's premium plan, but the few demos available on the web — albeit simple ones created by the Poe team — work mostly as advertised.
The preview comes at a bit of an awkward time for Poe: An investigation by Wired last month found that Poe lets users download paid articles on demand from news publications. Wired claims that Quora's in-house assistant chatbot was used to obtain copies of articles from publishers like The New York Times and The Atlantic.
Quora disputed that this was incorrect, and still disputes it.