Highlights:

  • The feature was stealthily released out to all Poe users, enabling anybody to compose a short text prompt and pick an existing LLM as the foundation for their new creation.
  • D’Angelo also said that a person need not have any coding experience to create a chatbot with Poe, and that the company is developing an API that will enable more advanced bot development and hosting.

Poe, a platform for building and engaging with chatbots driven by large language models (LLMs), has released a new feature that allows anybody to create their chatbot with only a few words.

The feature was stealthily released out to all Poe users recently, enabling anybody to compose a short text prompt and pick an existing LLM as the foundation for their new creation. Its foundation can be ChatGPT or Claude Instant, which are two leading general-purpose conversational agents.

The user-generated prompt combined with the LLM are later utilized to generate a new, customizable chatbot that can be shared with others. Poe asserts that this method can produce various chatbots with distinct characteristics and purposes.

Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora, which owns and operates Poe, said, “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. 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.”

Poe has launched several example bots that users can test out to demonstrate the feature’s potential, such as PirateBot, which speaks like a swashbuckling buccaneer, Roastmaster, which insults the user with witty comebacks; and Chefbot, which provides culinary advice and recipes.

According to D’Angelo, Poe provides several benefits for chatbot developers, including a user-friendly interface that works across multiple devices and platforms, a different URL for each bot that can be shared and accessed easily, a curated list of the best bots for users to discover and follow, and a free service that covers the costs associated with using large language models.

D’Angelo also said that a person need not have any coding experience to create a chatbot with Poe, and that the company is developing an API that will enable more advanced bot development and hosting. The API would essentially allow users to host bots on servers they control.

The Boost in Digital Assistants and Bots

This update to Poe is the latest news about personalized AI chatbots. Last month, many of the industry’s most prominent names, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google, made waves with their key product launches.

The update places Poe in direct competition with Character.AI, another artificial intelligence startup that has garnered attention and funding for its capacity to generate chatbots that can imitate various personalities, including those of celebrities and fictitious characters.

Character.AI, which former Google developers founded, raised USD 150 million and attained a USD 1 billion valuation last month, becoming one of the industry’s few unicorns.

Poe and Character.AI both are capitalizing on the rising demand for personalized and immersive chatbot experiences that entertain, educate, and connect users with their beloved characters and brands. Grand View Research predicts that the global market for conversational AI will reach USD 13.9 billion by 2028.