Cohere, a Toronto-based startup founded by former Googlers, is making its mark in the generative AI market. The company has released a new API called Chat API, which allows third-party developers to build chat applications with Cohere’s proprietary large language model, Command. The API is aimed at simplifying the creation of conversational AI products for enterprises. Cohere also offers APIs for content generation and text summarization. In addition to the API, Cohere has launched its own chatbot demo, the Coral Showcase, where users can test the chatbot’s capabilities. However, VentureBeat found that the Coral chatbot powered by Command was slower than some competing chatbots in returning responses but was accurate and up-to-date.
The new Chat API from Cohere features Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which allows developers to control a chatbot’s information sources. Developers can constrain the information sources to their own enterprise data or expand them to scan the web while still leveraging the chatbot’s training and text generation abilities. Cohere’s blog post states that RAG systems improve the relevance and accuracy of generative AI responses by incorporating information from data sources that were not part of pre-trained models. Cohere’s Chat API currently supports two additional information sources: web search implementation and plain text documents from the enterprise. The company plans to expand its connector/modular ecosystem to offer more features in the future.
In addition to Cohere’s Chat API, the company offers three modular components for developers: document mode, query-generation mode, and connector mode. Document mode allows developers to specify which documents the chatbot should reference when answering user prompts. Query-generation mode instructs the chatbot to return search queries based on user-submitted information. Connector mode enables developers to connect the chatbot to the web or other information sources. Cohere’s announcement comes after OpenAI’s recent reintroduction of web browsing capabilities to its ChatGPT and its effort to court enterprise users with ChatGPT for Enterprise.