Poe, Quora’s cross-platform, subscription-based aggregator for AI-powered chatbots such as GPT-4o from OpenAI and Claude from Anthropic, has introduced a feature called Previews that allows users to create interactive apps right within chats with chatbots.
Using Previews, Poe users may create dynamic presentations, games, and even drum machines by typing commands such as “Analyze the information in this report and turn it into an interactive, digestible presentation to help me understand it.” The apps can be made using many chatbots (like Meta’s Llama 3 and GPT-4o), using information from submitted media, including movies, and sharing the information with anybody via a link.
Previews bear a resemblance to Anthropic’s recently released Artifacts, which are specialized work areas where users can modify and contribute to AI-generated content such as documents and code. However, Previews allows HTML output from any chatbot, while Artifacts is restricted to Anthropic’s models. Previews now supports CSS and Javascript functionality, with more to come (according to Quora’s pledge).
According to Quora, chatbots that “excel” at programming, such as Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-4o, are the ideal candidates for Previews.
It costs $20 a month for Poe’s premium account, which prevents this reporter from testing the process of creating an app with Previews. However, the few samples available online—albeit straightforward examples made by the Poe team—function essentially as promised.
Previews come at a very difficult moment for Poe, who was discovered to have enabled customers to download paywalled content from news publications on demand according to a Wired investigation published last month. Wired claims to have used Quora’s in-house Assistant chatbot to collect copies of pieces from publications including The New York Times and The Atlantic.
Quora denied being in the wrong, and it continues to deny that.