As a writer, coder, and occasional graphic designer, I decided to upgrade my generative AI experience and finally pulled the trigger on a paid subscription to YouPro. As a user of YouImagine and YouChat, the upgrade over other AI subscriptions made sense; however, I was still trying to decide if it was worth the money.
Today I’ll share my thoughts on YouPro, the premium AI subscription plan by You.com, to help those of you who were in my shoes. I will review the main features and then wrap up with my final thoughts on the subscription.
TLDR:
- With YouPro, the new YouChat provides more accurate and precise answers for more complex responses
- YouImagine’s new Standard Diffusion XL is a great improvement in quality over past models
- YouWrite is a good tool for all forms of writing
- The YouPro tool suite is well worth it (especially at $10/month)
For those of you who haven’t used You.com
You.com is an AI search engine. It features a chat interface that includes citations, web links, and app modules for queries. You can add or delete apps in the You.com app store for a personalized search experience. It is privacy focused and has private ads. With that, lets get into its new features.
GPT-4 YouChat > Base YouChat
This was the main selling point for me and was a nonnegotiable for whatever paid plan I decided on going with. On YouChat, you can now switch between the base version of YouChat and the GPT-4 version at the bottom of the page. I’ve noticed GPT-4 queries take a bit longer, so I use the base model for general searches and GPT-4 for more complex tasks. Overall, I’m really happy with this new YouChat. It feels a lot more powerful, accurate, and precise. I think the best way to show this is with use cases.
Travel
You can see here that GPT-4 provides more precise information about my query as it creates an itinerary for my route with length of stay, activities, and sleep recommendations. Base YouChat provides a more general overview of the experience and some general considerations we should make while planning. Base YouChat suggested how to plan my trip, whereas GPT-4 YouChat actually planned it.
Explaining a topic
GPT-4 YouChat is better at explaining topics, as shown below. It adds more detail to add color to the topic it is explaining. I also noticed that it seems to use more citations than Base YouChat, which is useful, not only from a credibility standpoint but also because I prefer to do additional reading outside of YouChat.
YouImagine continues to improve
Recently YouImagine added the Stable Diffusion XL model, which blows past models out of the water. The images below are from the same prompt; however, SD XL looks far more realistic than past Stable Diffusion models. It’s amazing to see these models progress in such a short time, and I’m excited that You.com keeps updating to the latest models for users.
I’ve recently been letting YouChat generate my YouImagine prompts for me to add more detail. The two play well together as YouChat GPT-4 can generate a lot more detailed text for the image, and for this prompt, the YouImagine app embeds itself into the YouChat result. This makes these interactions much more streamlined than working between two different apps.
YouWrite is a great tool for writers
Another cool feature of You.com that I didn’t get the chance to test before buying YouPro is their YouWrite tool. I think of it as a beefier YouChat dedicated to creating text. I’ve found several great use cases: advertisement, sentence simplifier, and blog. The one quirk is that you can’t follow up the response like you can in YouChat, so I’ve been starting my text generation in YouWrite, then migrating it to YouChat for further modifications.
It comes with additional features
YouChat GPT-4, YouImagine, and YouWrite are the three main products you get access to with the subscription plan; however, You.com lists other features such as priority usage, personalization, and early access to future products that are included in the plan. Given the current products, I’m excited to see what new things they add in the future.
So should you buy it?
In conclusion, I think this purchase was well worth it. For $10/month, YouPro is effectively bundling a $20/month product (ChatGPT Plus) and a $9/month product (Stable Diffusion) for a third the price of the two combined. And because the language and image models are integrated on the same platform, I realize how they work off each other nicely: I can move content between the different apps easily. For this, YouPro’s value is greater than the sum of its parts.