SimilarAskTM simplifies access to sophisticated competitive digital analytics.
Similarweb, a leading digital data and analytics company powering critical business decisions, has announced the beta release of SimilarAsk: an AI assistant within their platform designed to answer real user questions.
This is a product feature, which started as a hackathon project that wowed the Similarweb executive team back in April.
Using SimilarAsk is ambitiously compared to working with the world’s most effective and talented market researcher, strategy consultant and data scientist combined in one – with ‘instant result’ capabilities.
By combining Similarweb Digital Data with the world’s best AI models, the possibilities for creating customer value are pitched as ‘amazing.’
AI is transforming tech for the user
For months, Similarweb has been providing regular updates on the spectacular rise and, more recently, the plateauing growth, of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Behind the scenes, the R and D team was mulling how breakthrough large language model AI techniques could be applied to enhancing the Similarweb digital data platform, providing customers with faster answers to their most important questions.
The advantage of the chatbot-style user interface is seen in the delivery of answers that, in some cases, otherwise would have required customers to visit multiple screens within the online platform, mash up the results in a spreadsheet and ask an analyst or consultant to help with the interpretation of the results.
As we refine this tool, Similarweb says it is confident of providing its entire customer base with answers that only big companies with sophisticated analytics teams would have been able to access in the past.
SimilarAsk is also pitched as particularly useful for new users who haven’t yet learned their way around the Similarweb platform.
Power users will likely continue to use the menu-driven user interface for queries they run on a regular basis.
Where a digital intelligence assistant would provide the most value to them is when they want to ask a novel question that product designers may not have anticipated.
In other words, the AI assistant can write a database query and obtain results that wouldn’t be accessible from any screen previously discoverable within the platform. Some of what Similarweb envisions, such as the ability to create custom visualizations on the fly, is part of the plan but not yet baked into the software.
From hackathon concept to product
The original hackathon demo showed how SimilarAsk could deliver more customer value by speeding time to insight, providing access to what are effectively new platform features and using AI analytics to put query results in context.
Powered by OpenAI APIs, the hackathon demo chatbot took user prompts and transformed them into the functions and database queries our platform understands.
The productized version can work with multiple AI models, not just OpenAI’s.
Similarweb says that with SimilarAsk 1.0 Beta now released 2.0 will follow soon.
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