Quora's Poe now lets users create and share web apps

Poe, Quora’s subscription-based, cross-platform aggregator for AI-powered chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, has launched a feature called Previews that lets people create interactive apps directly in chats with chatbots.

Previews 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 a digestible and interactive presentation to help me understand it.” The apps can be created using more than one chatbot (say, Meta’s Llama 3 and GPT-4o) and draw on info from uploaded files, including videos, and can be shared with anyone via a link.

Previews are a lot like Anthropic’s recently introduced Artifacts: dedicated workspaces where users can edit and add to AI-generated content like code and documents. But Artifacts is limited to Anthropic’s models, whereas Previews supports HTML output — with CSS and JavaScript functionality at the moment (and more to come in the future, Quora’s pledging) — from any chatbot.

Quora says that Previews works best with chatbots that “excel” at programming, like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro.

I wasn’t able to test creating an app with Previews, which requires paying $20 per month for Poe’s premium plan. But the few demos around the web — simple demos, albeit, and created by the Poe team — work more or less as advertised.

Previews arrives at somewhat of an awkward time for Poe; an investigation by Wired last month found that Poe allowed users to download paywalled articles from news publications on demand. Wired claims that it managed to obtain copies of stories from publishers like The New York Times and The Atlantic using Quora’s in-house Assistant chatbot.

Quora disputed — and still disputes — that it was in the wrong.