Search engine You remains ahead of Google and Bing in conversational search. After launching its ChatGPT-style AI, the site is launching multi-modal conversational research. In other words, this search engine can combine text with images, graphics, etc. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any more reliable.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Google may have a serious competitor going up against them in conversational search. It has always been committed to being one step ahead of the two giants of the web. This search engine does not come from anywhere: its CEO, Richard Socher, worked at Salesforce or MetaMind before founding the company in 2021. Last December, You.com implemented conversational search, a kind of ChatGPT connected to the Internet. Just like the new Bing, you cite your sources when replying. While Google uses multimodal search on the one hand and conversational search on the other with Bard, You merges the two.
You go to the multimodal search by AI
On February 7th, You.com announced YouChat2.0, the evolution of YouChat, the ” AI search assistant that helps you find answers to complex questions“. It is based on the CAL language model developed by the company. This evolution of YouChat makes it possible to chat with the “ search engine to receive real-time results in a variety of rich media modalities, including graphics, images, video, tables, charts, text, and code“, we can read in the announcement ticket.
The most telling example is that you can chat with the AI and at any time ask it to generate an image by the AI via Stable Diffusion. There is also some strange behavior to note: sometimes the platform indicates that it cannot generate such an image, but immediately offers to create it anyway. You can also ask YouChat to generate tables, such as laptop comparisons.
Another use case presented by You.com: the possibility of integrating the prices of a company’s shares or a cryptocurrency during the conversation, what Bard does not plan to do and what Bing does not, for example. However, like Bing, we keep the search results associated with the request. For Richard Socher, “ It’s a big step forward in making great language models multimodal in the sense that the different modalities are text, but also code, tables, graphics, and images and interactive elements, and sometimes that’s the best way to respond to your question. I sincerely believe that this way of representing the answer to this question is better than any text. “, he saidTechCrunch.
Much bigger gaps than Bing or ChatGPT
What we quickly notice when using You is that it is still more limited than ChatGPT or Bing. The factual errors are numerous, especially when the response does not come from links to web pages. In fact, Google got Bard wrong, Microsoft got Bing wrong during their respective conferences. But the general level of You is still lower, although it should be remembered that the program is in beta phase.
For now, You has announced that it wants to add more apps available to search. If YouChat 2.0 has improved the reliability of the information provided, there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. Also, we don’t know much about CAL, the language model behind You and Richard Socher’s conversational agent is very discreet about it. However, he specifies that at some point he will reveal how his artificial intelligence works.
Your strategy for the coming months
In his interview withTechCrunchYou CEO Richard Socher does not go out of his way: for him, “Google is a monolithic, monopolistic and closed search engine that has ended up using AI as a weapon against users to fulfill its true purpose: advertising.You, on the other hand, would grow double digits every month and be used by millions of people. According to the SimilarWeb site, You.com would register almost 16 million visits per month (January 2023).
The question that arises after this excellent growth is that of monetization: You are and remain first and foremost a company and you must generate income to ensure your sustainability. In the field of search engines, this question is fundamental and even more so when we talk about conversational AI. It’s hard to monetize an Internet-connected ChatGPT, and that’s part of why Google was reluctant to launch Bard. But for Richard Socher, his company’s stakes are not the same as those of Google or Microsoft: “we don’t have to earn $500 million a day. We don’t have that pressure right now as a startup. But this year we will think about monetization and try to explore different ways.».
On the other hand, You does not have the ecosystem of Google or Microsoft. We know that Google is working to integrate Bard into Chromebooks to make it more accessible. Same story with its competitor: the GPT language model is coming to Office soon.
The mediaTechCrunchspecifies in the report that this could include private ads, but also a system of subscriptions to modules for various uses: writing blog articles or essays. Also, you can open to “the creation of third-party applications, such as the Stock application that displays a stock chart.» The CEO of You is realistic and says that «sure the competition is tough and you need to create something that is unique and different, but at the same time good enough to support most of the things that people currently expect from their search engine».
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