AI search engine You.com has introduced a new Custom Assistant feature that allows anyone to build an AI assistant for free using the same technology as ChatGPT, the company announced in a press release on Thursday.
Custom Assistants allow you to create AI assistants that can be tailored to answer questions for your specific needs. This means you can save time by not having to ask the AI for a lengthy preamble of specific instructions. For example, if you're creating an AI assistant that's knowledgeable about all things audio equipment, you can zero in on your use case without needing to ask for speaker-related parameters.
For your custom assistant, you can choose from GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Claude 3 Opus. These are the large-scale language models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Anthropic's Claude. LLMs are AI models that are trained on large amounts of text data and can generate new sentences.
To use the custom assistant on You.com, more after that Add newHere you can select the LLM you want to use, give your custom assistant a name, and tell it how it will work.
You.com launched in 2021 as a rival to Google. It differentiated itself from Google by aiming to be more personalized and more secure. It was also quick to incorporate AI into its feature set. When ChatGPT came to the world in late 2022, creating a chatbot interface with interactive boxes on the right and a menu bar on the left, other AI chatbots followed a similar design language. You.com was also redesigned in late 2023, borrowing many elements from ChatGPT.
However, it is difficult for new entrants to enter the online search market. Late last year, AI search engine Neeva found it difficult to compete with Google and shut down. At this point, it is unclear what You.com's reach is, but considering that Google controls over 90% of the online search market, You.com is competing with engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo for the remaining 10%.
Editor's note: CNET has used its AI engine to create dozens of articles and label them accordingly. The notes you're reading are attached to articles that substantively address AI topics, but are all written by our expert editors and writers. For more information, visit AI Policy.
