Introduction

Hi, everyone. I'm David. I am a senior software engineer here at u.com. And I drove two hours up from Waterloo, so I'm very excited to give you guys this talk.

Overview of u.com

So just a quick background on u.com. You know, we are a AI productivity engine that's designed to answer complex questions and also help automate workflows to make you and your business much more productive.

So a little bit of background. We were founded by two Stanford AI researchers back in about 2020.

And we were originally founded as a personalized search engine. This was before ChatGPT, before OpenAI GPT-3.

These were two researchers who had worked previously at Salesforce and at Stanford and wanted to leverage AI for search. They wanted to take on Google.

Founding and Evolution

And then in 2022, after ChatGPT came out, we became the first company to connect AI models to the internet. Now today, there's a lot of cutting edge features, obviously the industry has moved pretty fast since then, and I'm very excited to show some of these to you.

New Features

So here are some new u.com features. There's advanced source controls, which will be used to curate your search sources for faster and more accurate and relevant results. We've also enabled 50 megabyte file uploads just to have a deeper breadth of search and also enable some large corpuses of data to be uploaded and searched and answered upon.

And finally, we have the agent library, which is a feature we recently just released that I worked on, which allows you to share, save, and discover custom AI agents similar to GPT's built by you.com, your team, and the community.

Demonstration

So without further ado, let's get into the demo here.

Let's see if this works. One sec. Okay. I had to pull it up on the other screen, but this will do. Perfect. Cool. So let me get rid of this.

Using u.com Agents

So when you log on to u.com, you'll notice that there's this primary feature here, which is all of our agents. Now these agents are pre-built by us and there's several different categories, marketing, sales, engineering, you get the point.

We're especially good at enabling engineers, marketers, and salespeople to get their complex and repetitive tasks done quite quickly. So you can actually build your own agent, and this is one of the most powerful features we have right now.

So when you're building your agent, you'll notice that you can create a new custom agent, name your agent, and give it a description. This is pretty similar to what OpenAI does with GPTs, but we take it a step further.

So you'll notice that you can choose your base model of the agent, which you can choose from a pretty wide array of models here. We have your classic GPTs, GPT-40-mini, GPT-40, also quad, which people have a preference for as well. And if you're a fan of open source, there's Llama.

And if you want a model that is potentially uncensored, we have Misrule. So for the purposes of this demo, I will use Cloud 3.5 Sonnet.

And you'll notice here you can prompt your agent to do a multitude of different things. And this is, for us, this is kind of table stakes.

Advanced Source Management

1What really makes this a very powerful feature is our advanced source management control. So here you'll notice that you're able to manage some sources. So I can drop files and upload them.

In this case, I will select this washing machine manual and this image. And then the AI will be able to use that in its context to answer and reason about.

You can also control the web access, which this goes back to our origins as a search engine. We have web scale data, web scale crawling. And what this means is that when you enable web access, we'll access the web for information relevant to your query.

So this is doing a good job of combining the best of both worlds here. You're getting access to the latest models, and you're also getting access to the latest web data that we've crawled.

So normally people turn this on automatic, but if you're a real power user, and this is what I'm going to show you how to configure today, you would use advanced.

So you have search depth. Quick search, it's pretty self-explanatory. It's going to scan the pre-populated information we have for every web page and generate the answer based on that.

If you choose deep search, it's actually gonna browse the full webpage content. So it's gonna do like 10, 15 Google searches for you, right? And look at all the content on the actual webpage, and then use that content to formulate an answer.

And this is extremely helpful when you're doing deep research on maybe like a due diligence for some private equity deal, or you're looking for publications from a particular website.

Custom Web Sources

And if you do dynamic, we're going to decide for you. If we think your query, if you just search up Amazon, you probably want to go to Amazon.com. But if you search up the history of Amazon and how it revolutionized the e-commerce industry, we're going to go a bit deeper and pull in some more research for you there.

Another pretty powerful feature that we've added is the ability to add a custom web source. So what this means is that you can add, for instance, if you just want CNN for news, for election coverage, you can add CNN.

And then if you want u.com to search the web for other websites, you can leave this toggle on. If you would prefer to have u.com not search any other website and just be looking at cnn.com, you can flip it off. And this works for pretty much any website you can think of.

You can add multiple here. For instance, this documentation site for something I was working on earlier. You could add in sources from publications, scholarly websites.

A lot of our users use the NIH. So they'll put the NIH here and just search upon that.

And then if there's sources you don't like, you can exclude them here as well. So this is the advanced custom source controls.

Pre-built Agents

I've already had a couple of agents pre-built, so I'll show those to you in the interest of time. So if we go to the agent library here, which again is that cool new feature we just debuted, you go to my agents, you have a list of all the agents you've built. And these are all shareable with the world. So if you build something that's usable for a variety of use cases that you think might be helpful for other people to use, you can share it and they can access it here easily.

If you are using u.com in a team, then you can share agents with other people on your team and organization to enable them to be more productive. So I have a couple of agents here. One of these is for our fantasy football league to help people know what the rules are. But the one I'm going to be demoing today is going to be the Cypress Expert.

So this is a custom agent I made which has web access and sources. So if you look at here, in Mandarin sources, I have it turned on so it does deep search and it only uses the documentation site for the library that I want to use. So let's start a chat with it.

So, like you mentioned earlier, there's a pretty persistent issue with hallucinations in AI. For instance, he mentioned that when he was using AI, ChatGPT, to generate his profile, it kind of made some stuff up, which is not super cool. In our case, because we have the custom sources specified and we know exactly which website we want to pull our sources from, it really minimizes the amount of hallucinations.

For instance, here, this is actually very correct because it pulls directly from the documentation of the website. So you can imagine for more advanced use cases where accuracy is super important or the data you're looking for is a little bit hard to find just from a general search, using advanced source controls is quite powerful. So this is like a good example for engineering.

Marketing and Sales Agents

However, there's a couple more, and if you just go on u.com here and look on the homepage, you'll see these custom agents that we've pre-built for you, that we've curated for marketing, sales, product, data analysis, finance, and so forth. So for marketing, we have this brand voice agent here. And this is gonna write content aligned to your brand voice.

And what can make this even more powerful is if you have, for instance, a brand guideline that your brand team has put together, you can add it as a source here. To save some time, I've already done that. And this is using the brand voice agent with the u.com brand book attached to it as a custom source.

So you'll notice that it actually writes everything and cites the brand values that we want to represent in the post, and it writes it according to the tone of voice that our brand directors would want. For sales, we have an agent as well.

So we have a couple of here, sales emailer, meeting summarizer, company profiler. I think our company profiler is actually quite powerful. How many people here work in sales?

Show of hands. Okay, cool. So you guys, when you're doing outbound work, when you're looking at people that you're meeting with, selling to, you kind of want a good idea of what they do, what their background is, and what the company's background is too, right?

So this uses our advanced deep research technology, which crawls the web for all the relevant data you could possibly ever want. and it's gonna find key information for you about a company. So if I hit Airbnb, give it a sec, it's gonna tell you the general information about the company, their business information, financial information, and so forth.

And if you want more details, you can obviously ask it and it'll go look again for you. And yeah, so here we have kind of like the full power of custom agents and with advanced source controls.

Conclusion

So if you're someone who's looking to up-level your daily work routines or make yourself more efficient and productive at work or whatever else you do in your life, you should really consider checking out u.com using our custom agents with advanced source controls. It's a really easy and intuitive way to get access to some of the most accurate and relevant AI results on the internet.

I can later on, I don't think we have time for this, but later on if you guys come up to me, I can show you guys some research actually that's been done recently that shows that we pretty much lead search GPT perplexity and Bing in accuracy and the number of citations we generate. So a lot of powerful things going on behind the scenes there.

Questions and Future Developments

And yeah, I'm gonna open up the floor to questions now. One sec here, let me just bring back the slides.

We do have some new things that are coming up. It's like a simplified query bar, clarifying questions, which is kind of where the AI acts like a thought partner with you and kind of facilitates like a two-way discussion of ideas there, and also enables you to have more clarity on what you're searching. And then also advanced research and reasoning, which is like having a PhD in your pocket pretty much.

Upcoming Features

So thanks. Thanks for listening.

Promotions and Resources

We have a 25% off an annual V.com pro plan promo code here. If you'd like to scan that, that's like three months off.

And there's also a custom agents white paper, which will go into more detail about how sales and marketing could use custom agents in their professional lives. Thank you.