Highlights:
You.com has successfully secured USD 45 million from investors like Salesforce, Norwest Venture Partners, and others.
YouChat, an AI chatbot introduced by You.com, relies on C-A-L, an internally developed large language model.
You.com, a search startup, has launched an artificial intelligence chatbot that can produce natural language answers to customer queries and surface-related items like code snippets and graphs.
Palo Alto, California-based You.com, is a venture-backed startup that is a true competitor of Microsoft Corp.’s Bing and Google LLC in the search market. You.com, a search engine of Palo Alto, has successfully secured USD 45 million in funding from Norwest Venture Partners, Salesforce Inc. founder Marc Benioff, and some other investors.
You.com introduced an AI chatbot called YouChat last December. It can respond to user questions in a natural language format. It relies on an internally developed large language model called C-A-L. Recently developed new multimodal search chatbot You.com is an updated version of YouChat.
Other conversational tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, primarily focus on furnishing text-based answers to customer queries. As per You.com, Its new multimodal chatbot generates text answers as well as surfaces other types of data while responding to search queries.
If any user searches for the latest pricing of the company’s shares, in response YouChat can provide a live stock chart. A chatbot can return spreadsheet tables, videos, images, and other items per the user’s requirement.
To satisfy the user’s query, You.com is capable enough to display contextual information in a sidebar adjacent to the primary search results. For instance, the sidebar shows links to websites explaining Python coding concepts if any user enters a search query of programming language.
In the launch event of its multimodal chatbot, You.com said to a leading media house that its search engines have daily users in millions. Additionally, the startup is reportedly experiencing “double-digit percentage growth” every month. You.com is said to be touring the possibility of making money via its search engine by selling paid AI add-ons. It also empowers other companies to provide applications to customers.
You.com’s top competitors are seeing emerged multimodal search as a priority. At a recent event, Google previewed a feature that will empower customers to form search queries that blend an image with a text snippet. An example would be a user could add a photo of a desk and the text snippet “ matching chair” to find an e-commerce store providing chairs with corresponding color and design.
This month, Microsoft and Google declared plans to incorporate their respective search engines with conversational chatbots. LaMDA is an internally developed neural network based on Google’s chatbot. On the other hand, Microsoft is using OpenAI technology right now.