Hey friends, welcome back to another Wednesday issue where we take a closer look at one tool from last week’s Sunday Signal. Today, we’re exploring Quora’s new meta chatbot—Poe. I’ve been testing the waters over the past few days, and I’ve found Poe to be instrumental in the creation of this newsletter. Asking yourself how? Read on.

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Why Did Quora Create Poe?

Quora recently announced the launch of Poe, an innovative chatbot designed to enhance the existing capabilities of conversational agents and enhance the user experience. Leveraging Quora's vast repository of questions and answers, Poe aims to augment the current chatbot landscape—not replace it. The following three factors clarify the rationale behind Poe's creation:

1. Improve accessibility: Poe offers six cutting-edge AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, Claude Instant, Claude+, Sage, and Dragonfly, all within a single platform. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo noticed a critical issue with modern AI chatbots, which require users to open separate browsers to access them. Poe was developed to improve accessibility and functionality by eliminating such friction.

   • Applicability: students or researchers who need to perform multiple language-related tasks can use Poe to efficiently access multiple AI chatbots within a single platform.

2. Enhance user experience: If you've used ChatGPT before, you might be familiar with its clunky interface, laggy responses, and limited browser-only experience. Poe aims to address these issues by providing a smooth user interface, lightning-fast responses, and an application now available on iOS. You'll be amazed at how quickly Poe provides accurate and relevant responses to your queries.

   • Applicability: writers who need quick and accurate language suggestions, translators who need to communicate with people from different linguistic backgrounds, or even everyday users who want to chat with AI-powered virtual assistants

3. Capture market share: ChatGPT has experienced a surge in popularity over the past few months, with its closest competitor, Anthropic's Claude, only recently becoming accessible to the public through Poe. Quora has recognised the enormous potential of the AI chatbot market and is seizing the missed opportunities from competitors.

   • Applicability: Poe offers a unique value proposition to users who are looking for a single platform to access multiple AI chatbots with superior functionality and user experience.

How Does Poe Work?

Poe utilises advanced technologies such as Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse queries, search Quora's extensive database, and deliver appropriate responses to users. The app's database is designed in a question-answer format, allowing for swift and natural conversations. In fact, it feels like you're engaging with your own virtual personal assistant (and an incredibly efficient one at that).

Users also have the ability to provide feedback, upvote, downvote, or report any issues they encounter, all of which contribute to the improvement of Poe. The iterative nature of Poe means Quora is more likely to implement feedback and improve the service week on week.

It's important to understand that while Poe is a great tool, it does have some limitations. It relies solely on Quora's database and lacks the common sense reasoning and world knowledge that humans possess.

While Poe is a promising chatbot experience, it currently lacks the real-world applicability of ChatGPT plugins and AutoGPT. As a result, the market share is likely to be determined by the following question:

Do users prefer AI that can answer questions or AI that can perform tasks for them?

Why Should I Care?

1. Fast: Poe has access to Quora's powerful search and indexing capabilities which help quickly identify relevant content from across Quora's knowledge base. These tools speed up Poe's lookup process compared to a generic web search meaning rapid response times for users such as yourself.

2. Useful: Quora covers a vast range of topics at a deep level with expert contributors. Poe gets access to this breadth and depth of specialised knowledge which most chatbots cannot match. It works with the knowledge that rivals or surpasses general internet datasets.

3. Conversational: Poe adopts a friendly and casual tone to seem approachable and encourage open dialogue. It also aims to have nuanced discussions by sharing a wide range of perspectives and information—providing a balanced argument to any query. Most importantly it flows from past queries and understands tone better than ChatGPT (In my opinion).

4. Easy: Poe's UI benefits from an intuitive, trusted and transparent experience via seamless integration into Quora's existing platform. It benefits from a trusted experience and interface, alongside a clean UI and rapid responses (which seems to be lacking in ChatGPT). I’ve personally loved using Poe over the past few days, and have found it massively helpful in the creation of this very newsletter.

How Can I Use It?

As I mentioned in the introduction I’ve been playing around with it to enhance the quality and reliability of this newsletter. Aside from accessing multiple chatbots and prompting it with general questions, I also made personalised bots to execute functions for me.

With varied success, I created bots that can:

• Scour the internet for the top newsletters of any domain (ThroughNoise)

• Create personalised podcast questions for any guest (ThroughNoise2)

• Find the top-rated recipe for any meal based on Google Rankings (ThroughNoise3)

Ultimately, my favourite was the newsletter indexing bot (very meta of me, I know). The best thing about it? 

There’s truly no limit it’s search capabilities, try it below:

ThroughNoise Bot.

+ You can use create your own bots with Poe through the app on iOS or through your web browser here.

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Let me know what you think

• 😎 This was wicked smart

• 😒 It's alright

• 😤 I'm unsubscribing immediately

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What are your thoughts on Poe? Reply to this email and let me know!

— Alex