A Better ChatGPT App? Poe wants to Build the Universal AI Messaging Client

A Better App?  Poe Logo,  More Coming, Quora

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE/TECH/APPS

A better ChatGPT app: Poe wants to build the universal AI messaging client

The chatbot explosion is coming — but building a great chat app is harder than it seems. Quora thinks a lot of developers might be looking for a simpler way.

By DAVID PIERCE   Apr 10, 2023   in TheVerge

Poe’s logo, a purple chatbot character.

Poe isn’t a chatbot — it’s an app for all your chatbots. Image: Poe

ChatGPT is a remarkable piece of technology and a really crappy consumer product. Load OpenAI’s revolutionary chatbot at any given time, and after a long wait, you’ll be greeted with… well, likely as not, a message saying ChatGPT is over capacity and you can’t use it anyway. It’s slow even in the best of situations, and its blocky white-and-gray interface doesn’t exactly scream high design. There’s not even a mobile app.

Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Quora, sees that as something of an opportunity. Since last summer, just before the chatbot craze swept the tech industry, Quora has been feverishly working on an app called Poe that D’Angelo says he hopes can make bots easier for everyone to use by bringing them all in one place. “We have a lot of different things we want to build on top of this technology,” he says. “But the starting point is just, let’s make it easy for people to use it.”

The way D’Angelo sees it, we’re only at the beginning of a huge boom in interactive bots. Right now, there’s Bard and Bing and ChatGPT and not much else, but pretty soon, there will be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of different bots for different purposes. And for almost any company that isn’t a tech giant, “the amount of work it takes to make a high-quality chat experience is just too much.” Google and Microsoft have the resources to do it, of course, and I’d bet you won’t see either in Poe anytime soon. But there’s a whole industry of bot startups still to come, including from Poe itself: Quora just announced a user-created bots feature that lets you build your own bot to talk like a pirate, roast you mercilessly, or teach you Japanese.  ... '