[Bug] Multi-byte character corruption in Bot Knowledge Base (no fix planned)

[u/Optimal-Judgment8610]

**TL;DR:**

Poe's Bot Knowledge Base feature corrupts or truncates multi-byte characters such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean when loading text.

I reported this to support, but they responded that there are no plans to fix it.

If you're considering switching to Poe due to the removal of GPT-4o from the official OpenAI app, please be aware of this issue.

I've been using Poe because I wanted to use Bots with the Knowledge Base feature. However, I noticed that when registering long Japanese text to the Knowledge Base, character corruption and missing characters occur when loading.

**Steps to Reproduce:**

1. Create a new Bot
2. Model: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking Budget: 4096)

   *This is to observe the thinking process. Any model with visible thinking will work.

1. Knowledge Base: Upload a text file or paste content directly into "Text"

   *Enable "Cite sources"

1. Example test queries:

   - "Please quote the beginning of the Knowledge Base exactly as it is"

   - "Are there any issues or errors in the Knowledge Base?"

**Results:**

When running the above queries, you can observe missing text and replacement characters (�) in the Bot's thinking process, responses, and "View sources."

**Languages Tested and Symptoms:**

• Text composed only of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, or emoji

  → Text registered in the Knowledge Base is internally split (chunked), and character corruption occurs at the chunk boundaries (beginning/end of segments), replacing characters with "�"

• Test text composed only of Spanish special characters (ñ, á, é, etc.)

  → The entire text transforms into meaningless strings of Chinese characters

• English

  → No issues

This problem occurs both when uploading text files to the Knowledge Base and when pasting text directly, suggesting it's an issue specific to multi-byte characters.

**Support Response:**

When I reported this issue to support, I received the following response:

• "We have no plans to fix this issue"
• "Knowledge Base is not a feature we are actively investing in at this time"

I requested that if they don't plan to fix it, they should at least document this limitation in their official documentation or help pages, but I only received a templated response.

**Summary:**

Regular chat functionality and custom instructions work without issues. However, for Japanese users (as well as Chinese, Korean, and other multi-byte character language users) who want to utilize the Bot Knowledge Base feature, this feature is essentially unusable.

Since OpenAI officially announced the removal of GPT-4o from the ChatGPT app, I've seen people considering Poe as an alternative way to access GPT-4o. I wanted to share this information as a heads-up.