Quora’s Poe chatbot introduces better context window and document upload support

Quora’s AI-powered chatbot service Poe introduced a bunch of new tools on Tuesday ranging from a larger context window for better responses to support for URL retrieval, and document upload, along with continuing other users’ public conversations.

The company said in an email to customers that with Anthropic launching Claude-2, Poe is making its 100,000-token context windows available to everyone. Earlier this was available to paid users through the Claude+ model.

As my colleague Kyle Wiggers explained in his article about Claude 2, the context window is the amount of text a model considers before generating responses.

“Context window refers to the text the model considers before generating additional text, while tokens represent raw text (e.g. the word ‘fantastic’ would be split into the tokens ‘fan,’ ‘tas’ and ‘tic’).”

Additionally, Poe is also bringing ChatGPT-16k and GPT-4-32k (the numbers indicate tokens in a context window) to the app. It said that initially, these models will be available to subscribers, but it hopes “to bring them to everyone over time.”

Apart from expanding the context window, Poe now supports URL fetching and uploading documents. This means users can ask questions about a web page or a document to find out more about the topic.

Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo tweeted saying that these new features allow users to ask questions about a case like Microsoft’s fight with FTC over the Activision Blizzard acquisition using a court document. Users can also compare two documents to find out about changes made to a privacy policy or a company’s service offering.

Plus, Poe is introducing a feature that lets users import a copy of a publicly shared chat by someone else and continue it with their own accounts. The app maker said that this “Continue chat” feature is compatible with newly launched file uploading and URL fetching features, so users can add their own questions to the mix apart from already posted queries. However, the “Continue chat” feature is only available on the web at the moment with availability on mobile apps coming soon.

Quora launched Poe to iOS users in February and Android users in May. In March, the company introduced a $19.99 per month or a $199.99 per year subscription with higher chat limits and access to better conversational models. In April, Poe released a simple tool to let users generate their own bots with text prompts. With new updates, Poe now offers access to models like Claude 2, Claude-instant-100k, GPT-4, ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Google PaLm. Industry analysts told TechCrunch that Poe has around a million monthly active users on mobile apps.

With the rising number of consumer products offering AI-powered chatbot functionalities, Poe is trying to chart its own path by creating features on top of multiple models and enabling discovery for custom user-created bots.