I have to admit, I did not think my Google Search use would decrease the more I used AI chatbots. Boy, was I wrong – it’s crazy how quickly your habits adjusts.
My favourite AI-powered chatbots are ChatGPT and Gemini. I have them side by side as an app-pair (borrowing Samsung’s terminology) in my browser. Like so:
When I’m curious about something, I type out a query, copy and paste it into both chatbots, and read through both responses.
For the kind of stuff that I usually ask about, more often than not, I prefer the answers that ChatGPT produces. However, Gemini’s answers are usually shorter, which I appreciate sometimes but I guess that brevity means in most cases, ChatGPT’s answers are more comprehensive.
I’m not advocating for one over the other; both have free versions, so you can try them and see what works best for you. But if you’re researching something in-depth, you might find that using just one chatbot isn’t enough. In fact, you may need to turn to more specialised AI chatbots.
Perplexity and Claude are just as capable as ChatGPT and Gemini. Claude, in particular, is often highlighted as a better option for developers. So, if you’re diving deep into specific topics, you might find that my simple app-pair setup won’t cut it.
There’s a whole ocean of AI chatbots
As you know, you cannot keep up with the number of AI-powered bots that are out there. Whatever you are interested in, there is a bot that specialises in it.
For example, JesusReplika is “an AI language model that embodies the essence and teachings of Jesus Christ from the Bible.”
The description says “While not an all-knowing deity, the Replika of Jesus offers comfort and support to people dealing with various personal struggles, encouraging them to seek community support and professional help when necessary.”
I asked it a question to see what it’s all about. Judge for yourself:
JesusReplika is just one in an ocean of specialised AI-powered bots. I guarantee that you will find one specialising in whatever you’re into.
However, if you have many interests, you could find yourself with 10 AI chatbots you need to keep track of. At that point it becomes too much of a hustle that you will revert to using a few all-rounders instead.
That’s where Poe comes in
Poe is a platform that allows users to interact with various AI-powered chatbots. It was developed by Quora, who I’m sure you’ve come across while searching for stuff on the web.
The name ‘Poe’ stands for ‘Platform for Open Exploration’. Think of it as a hub for AI tools, enabling users to ask questions and explore topics through AI models from different sources.
“The AI on Poe is powered by models from several sources, trained by different companies. Those different models are optimised for different tasks, represent different points of view, or have access to different knowledge. Some models are fine-tuned versions of models created by others.”
There are plenty of AI chatbots accessible via Poe that I’m sure most will find all they need. Everything from the more mainstream ChatGPT to the super-specific JesusReplika and others like it are all accessible via Poe.
“Poe currently supports o1-preview, o1-mini, ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-4o and DALL-E 3 from OpenAI, Claude 3, and Claude 3.5 from Anthropic, Stable Diffusion 3 from Stability AI, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash from Google, Llama 3.1 from Meta, FLUX-Pro from Black Forest Labs, Ideogram 2.0 by Ideogram, Playground-v3 by Playground, Mistral Large 2 by Mistral, Command R Plus from Cohere, and millions of unique bots created by the community.”
In short, the benefits of using Poe are:
Access to multiple AI models in one place
Easy/seamless switching between models
A unified user experience that eliminates the need to learn different tools with their own unique layouts and pricing. This makes it user-friendly and straightforward
Poe emphasizes exploration, allowing you to ask questions to multiple models and discover answers across a variety of knowledge domains. This is particularly useful if you want to explore a topic thoroughly and see how different AI models interpret or respond to complex queries. Kind of like my app-pair but scaled all the way up.
How to use Poe:
Whatever device you use, Poe is available to you. There are apps for Android, iOS, Mac and Windows (Linux folks you already knew there wouldn’t be one for you). However, you can always access Poe via a browser and so any internet capable device can use it. Just visit poe.com.
What do you use?
They say AI chatbots are not meant for factual type of questions, you know, the kind you normally ask Google. I know this to be true but I find myself reaching out for ChatGPT and then proceeding to Search if I’m not happy with the sources ChatGPT sites.
I guess the problem is having to make a determination everytime you want to look up something. Determining whether to Google it or ask an AI bot is not something my mind is fond of. So, I find that I go to what I use and then go to Google if I’m not happy with the answer or the supporting source links.
It’s a bad habit but I won’t lie to you, that’s what I do. What do you guys use? Has your Google Search use decreased since these AI bots became widely available?-techzim