Among the first competitors to ChatGPT and its meteoric rise was YouChat—a conversational AI chatbot and search engine developed by You.com. The firm was created to offer better search results to users of the internet by integrating AI technology with the existing indexing and referencing techniques used in search platforms. You.com quickly became a part of existing AI search engine firms that catered to users’ requests with a unique approach that brought about not just search results, but also an intelligent interface that promoted better information availability per search result. YouChat was launched in the final weeks of 2022, tapping into the galvanized market OpenAI had created with ChatGPT. Soon after, You.com—thanks to YouChat—became one of the most popular AI search platforms and began experiencing exponential growth across their offerings.
Much like other competitors like Bing Chat, You.com also offers users the ability to converse with YouChat right from their search results to support their pointed search efforts. With contextual understanding aided by natural language processing and advanced neural networks, YouChat AI brings a rich blend of answering technology alongside a feed-like display as seen on social media platforms for users to go through and choose based on the results’ relevance to their search query. After witnessing massive growth and popularity, You.com has branched out and entered other AI and machine learning spaces such as AI writing and image generation. The upcoming sections discuss YouChat and its unique features that set it apart from other competitors.
What Is YouChat? Uncovering the AI Search Engine’s Features
YouChat emerged as an early competitor to ChatGPT.
YouChat was introduced by its parent company to primarily improve the quality of search results users are provided with and to enhance the functional integrity of large language models. Being connected to the internet, YouChat is aware of recent events and can extract information from the web. Instead of providing just a list of links, the chatbot also interacts with the users and offers a conversational gist of results alongside a set of sources. Users can rate the response of the chatbot with a simplistic positive and negative rating system that enables the chatbot to identify deficiencies and correct them as the interaction progresses. Thanks to contextual understanding, users can continue to ask related questions in succession and YouChat will provide responses that take into account previous queries and the answers provided.
YouChat can be accessed either via a web browser or through mobile applications available for both Android and iOS. Apart from responding to the average search query, YouChat is also capable of summarizing text, composing short pieces of written material, writing code, composing emails, and building a planner for day-to-day activities. YouChat AI, despite being a conversational chatbot functioning within an AI search engine, aims to train its focus on relevance and accuracy. This is comparable to other chatbots such as Claude, which look to provide the least harmless responses to user queries. Despite its proficiency, however, YouChat is still prone to instances of hallucination and all information provided by it must be verified independently by users.
YouChat AI’s Technical Features
YouChat is built upon a hybrid language model that combines features of several popular LLMs.
You.com was launched in 2020 by scientists that were formerly a part of the firm Salesforce. About a year following the launch of the firm, the world was catapulted into the language model boom, which essentially made the market conducive to more language model offerings. YouChat was launched soon after, and its first version found much praise among the developer community alongside users of the platform. YouChat AI is based on a blend of multiple language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and 3.5, Google’s BERT, and Carnegie Mellon University’s Transformer-XL, among others. The premium subscription tier—YouPro—also offers access to language models like GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion XL. The pricing for YouChat’s YouPro subscription is pegged at $9.99 a month, with a discounted monthly rate of $6.99 for students. YouChat subscriptions can also be bought yearly, with the prices going up to $119.99 a year. However, YouChat goes beyond these chatbots and is also endowed with several unique modifications that were made to its operating model. After consistent success, You.com upgraded YouChat to a new model named YouChat 2.0 in the initial weeks of February 2023 to cater to user demand. The upgraded version was better equipped to deal with more complex user demands and was also provided with better conversational AI technology.
With the growth of both global rivalries and stiff competition between other giants like Bard and ChatGPT, You.com proceeded to further upgrade YouChat’s interface in May 2023, rolling out YouChat 3.0, which developed upon existing learnings from its two predecessors. Its previous version and YouChat 3.0 operate on a unique language model that brings together other models’ features and is called CAL (Chats, Apps, and Links) while also holding onto the unique features of You.com’s interface. Apart from these models, YouChat also utilized information from social media platforms, scientific articles, Wikipedia pages, books, and other pieces of text. YouChat’s growing users and popularity stand as a testament to its features and abilities to provide seamless information.
What Lies in Store for YouChat and Other Conversational AI Chatbots
YouChat has garnered massive popularity since its release and is bound to grow further.
Though definitive information on You.com’s future plans for YouChat is not clear at this moment, it suffices to say that YouChat will continue to build upon its existing pattern of utilizing language models for conversation and information retrieval. The referencing and citation methods of YouChat are on par with those of other similar counterparts such as Perplexity.ai, and blend the power of both AI and search engine technology, which has witnessed drastic improvements over the past decade. Tools like YouChat will serve to further improve the prospects of AI and related tools in areas such as research and even education. However, it is important to bear in mind the complexities arising from AI and its concerns for academic integrity. Moreover, as firms proceed to expand their capabilities, regulations must be emphasized to keep AI misuse in check.
FAQs
1. What is the You.com chat feature?
You.com’s chat feature entails YouChat, a conversational AI chatbot that provides search results along with a conversational feature to allow users to look up information. YouChat is built on a combination of several language models along with unique modifications that enable its operations.
2. Is YouChat free?
While general access to YouChat remains free to users. The platform has also introduced a Pro subscription that entails access to powerful LLMs like GPT-4. At $9.99 a month, users can access better functionalities across You.com’s suite, while students can avail of the same services for $6.99. Moreover, YouChat also makes sure that its users’ data is kept private.
3. What language model does YouChat AI use?
YouChat uses a combination of several popular language models such as GPT-3 and 3.5, BERT, Transformer-XL, GPT-4, Stable Diffusion XL, and more. It also draws from web pages, Wikipedia, articles, scientific papers, and books. YouChat’s hybrid language model is called CAL (Chats, Apps, and Links), indicating the sources of its information for its dataset. Apart from these sources, You.com has also made numerous modifications to this dataset to suit YouChat’s unique operational requirements.