Quora opens its new AI chatbot app Poe to the general public

Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help to evolve Quora itself, the company says.

Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will arrive on other platforms in a few months.

In an announcement, the company explained it decided to launch Poe as a standalone product that’s independent of Quora itself because of how quickly AI developments and changes are now taking place. However, there will be some connections between the Q&A site and Poe. If and when Poe’s content meets a high enough quality standard, it will be distributed on Quora’s site itself, where it has the ability to reach Quora’s 400 million monthly visitors, the company noted.

To use Poe — which stands for “Platform for Open Exploration” — iOS users will have to create an account that’s verified with both a phone number and email address. They can then switch between three different AI chatbots available at launch.

These include the general knowledge chatbots Sage, Claude and Dragonfly. Both Sage and Dragonfly are powered by OpenAI while Claude is powered by Anthropic technology. All have their own limitations at present. For instance, Sage and Claude don’t have knowledge of events after 2021, and Dragonfly may refuse to answer some questions. All three have been known to make incorrect statements — which is another reason why Quora itself isn’t immediately integrating Poe into its service.

                                                                                             Image Credits: Poe screenshot

The factual inaccuracies offered by AIs like ChatGPT have raised concerns about whether these technologies are ready for primetime. The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently reported how ChatGPT has been shown to be fairly bad at math problems written in natural language, often returning entertaining, but entirely wrong answers with confidence. Another Q&A site, Stack Overflow, also banned users from posting answers created by ChatGPT because of inaccuracies.