Poe Previews is Insanely Good: Better than Claude Artifacts?

Poe, a popular competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude AI, has introduced a new feature called Previews that rivals Claude AI’s Artifacts.

It’s been weeks since Anthropic released Artifacts, yet users continue to discover new and intriguing use cases for them. Previews function similarly, allowing you to generate interactive web applications inside Poe.

In this article, we’ll explore the Previews feature, show examples, and create web-based games with simple text prompts.

Key takeaways:

1. Previews can generate web apps directly within a chat conversation.
2. Previews can build interactive web apps and games and can produce sounds.
3. Previews can be shared with anyone with web links.
4. Previews has a better performance than Claude Artifacts.

What is Poe?

Poe is an AI chatbot platform that allows users to interact with multiple AI models in one place. Poe provides access to various AI chatbots, including popular models like ChatGPT, Claude, and more.

The platform is packed with thousands of bots that you can use for free.

Here’s an interesting trivia: Poe was created by Adam D’Angelo, who is also the founder of Quora.

What are Poe Previews?

The Previews feature lets you see and interact with web applications generated directly in chats on Poe.

Here’s an example:

Prompt: Could you analyze the information in https://investor.nvidia.com/news/press-release-details/2024/NVIDIA-Announces-Financial-Results-for-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-2024/ and turn it into a digestible and interactive presentation to help me understand it

Poe can access the internet, so it will do research on the topic, analyze the accumulated data, and create an interactive visualization. The chart is interactive, too. You can hover over it to view more information.

Previews can also be shared with anyone via a dedicated link, and you can view your output in a new tab outside the chat.

More Examples

Check out these incredible examples of Poe Previews:

1. Interactive Flashcards

Educators or students could take advantage of Previews by gamifying their lessons or study materials with interactive flashcards.

2. Color number (hex code) collision simulation

Here’s another fun example where Poe creates a simulator of colliding colors.

You can choose two colors and when you click on the “Collide Colors” button, a beautiful burst of colors happens on the screen, which is quite fun to watch.

3. Drum machine code

One impressive capability of Poe Previews is its ability to create web apps that can play sounds. This takes the whole web app generator experience to the next level.

I can’t demonstrate the app in this article, but if you’re interested in testing it yourself, check it out here.

How Previews Work

The first thing you need to do is log in to Poe.com and start a new chat. Make sure to select your preferred language model, in this example, I selected Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Describe the application or data visualization you want in the prompt field and click on the submit button. Here’s an example where I ask Poe to make a Tetris game for me:

Prompt: Create a tetris game that can be controlled with the arrow keys. Add a scoring system

Poe was able to create this fully working Tetris game that can be played using the arrow keys. What’s more impressive is that when the game is over, it automatically resets, even without me specifying that game feature in the text prompt.

In the upper right corner, you’ll see an “open in a new tab” button to play the game in full screen.

This is incredibly powerful. In a matter of seconds, I was able to create a playable web application.

Share Your Poe Previews

You can share the Preview that you created by clicking on the “Share” button.

Here’s the link to the Tetris game I created above: https://poe.com/chat/3febenij3m6jrhcd46q

However, there is no way to share the full-screen version of the game or web app you created.

How much does it cost?

Poe offers a basic free version with limited features and daily message limits (100 interactions per day).

You can choose to upgrade to a monthly plan that costs $19.99 per month. This plan includes the following benefits:

• One-week free trial
• 5,000 interactions per month
• Access to all bot features and custom domains

The pro plan is currently offered to select regions only. For a full list of supported countries, see here.

Is It Better Than Claude Artifacts?

From my initial observation, Poe performs better than Claude. For example, it took me at least 5 prompts to create a working Tetris game with Claude while only one try in Poe.

Regarding the sharing feature, Artifacts can be shared in full-screen, while Previews can only be shared as a snippet of the chat.

I plan to write a more in-depth comparison of the two if there’s enough interest from my readers. If you want to see a side-by-side comparison, let me know in the comments.

Final Thoughts

I remember when Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, said that programming would be obsolete in the next five years. Well, he might be right. Today, we are entering a new era of programming, one where apps and software programs are built with instructions rather than manually coding them.

As a software engineer myself, it saddens me somewhat to know that I have spent decades learning various programming languages that I may no longer be using in the near future. However, instead of hating on AI, I see it as an opportunity to focus more on ideation and let the AI handle the programming.

Poe and Artifacts are just the beginning. There will be a huge wave of AI coding assistants incoming. I say that in the near future, 80% of the coding works will be done by AI, while the other 20% will be done by humans.

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