Subscription-based, cross-platform aggregator Quora for AI-powered chatbots like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4o now supports a feature called Previews that lets people create interactive apps directly in chats with chatbots.

Previews lets Poe users 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." More than one chatbot can be used to create an app-say, Meta's Llama 3 and GPT-4o-and can tap into information from uploaded files, including videos. And the apps can be shared with anyone via a link.

Previews is pretty close to Anthropic's new Artifacts: it's a focused workspace where users can write and append to AI-generated code and documents. But Artifacts is now locked down to only Anthropic's models, while Previews supports output in HTML - with CSS and JavaScript so far (and more in the future, Quora's promising) - 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 didn't try out the app creation option, since it requires paying $20 a month for Poe's premium plan. Still, the few demos available around the web — simple demos, at least, and demoed by the Poe team — work more or less as advertised.

Previews comes at a bit of an awkward moment for Poe; an investigation by Wired last month found that Poe permitted users to download paywalled articles from news publications on demand. Wired claims it was able 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.