Similarweb, a 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 our whole executive team back in April, and they are very proud that today they are bringing it to Similarweb users,” says a company spokesperson.
“Using SimilarAsk will be like 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 our unique Similarweb Digital Data with the world’s best AI models, the possibilities for us to create value for our customers are simply amazing.”
“For months, Similarweb has been providing journalists with regular updates on the spectacular rise and, more recently, the plateauing growth, of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Behind the scenes, our R&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 spokesperson adds.
“The advantage of the chatbot-style user interface is that it delivers answers that, in some cases, otherwise would have required customers to visit multiple screens within our 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, we think we will be able to provide our entire customer base with answers that only big companies with sophisticated analytics teams would have been able to access in the past.”
SimilarAsk will be 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 regularly. A digital intelligence assistant would provide the most value to them when they want to ask a novel question that our 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 we envision, such as the ability to create custom visualizations on the fly, is part of our plans but not yet baked into the software.
“The original hackathon demo showed how we can deliver more value to our customers 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 we’re launching now can work with multiple AI models, not just OpenAI’s,” says the spokesperson.
The launch of SimilarAsk will occur in two phases, with 1.0 Beta released this week and 2.0 following soon. The first SimilarAsk Beta speeds access to existing insights within Similarweb's solutions. Similarweb users can submit a natural language query in multiple languages to SimilarAsk 1.0 Beta through a navigation bar. It then responds with a menu of specific pages within the platform that delivers the relevant data to answer that query.
“SimilarAsk 2.0 will be a dynamic AI tool. When a Similarweb user asks a novel question for which Similarweb’s solutions do not have an existing answer, the AI tool will create a database query and produce results not accessible from any screen previously discoverable within the platform. SimilarAsk 2.0 will power speed to new insights and the development of new features by accessing Similarweb Digital Data with LLMs. Similarweb customers can work with their sales or account representatives to have SimilarAsk added to their accounts,” the spokesperson concludes.