In 2023, Fiverr breathlessly announced the launch of Fiverr Neo, an AI assistant that would help buyers to find the perfect match for sellers with a simple conversation. Unfortunately, like so many things in AI, the reality is a little different….
Fiverr Neo looked really cool when the freelance company first announced it. It sounded so human – and who doesn’t want help finding the hay in Fiverr’s spiky needlestack of sellers?
Fiverr Neo sounded like a great use case for AI, and I – along with a lot of other Fiverr users – was curious to see how Fiverr’s new AI assistant could help me. I had a couple of questions:
- How could sellers get featured in Neo?
- Could Neo help buyers to brief better?
It was a long wait until January/February when most people gained access to Neo. Safe to say, Neo has underwhelmed many with its clunky, agonizingly slow performance.
It’s called a hype cycle, and right now, I’d say Fiverr Neo has tumbled into the depths of the trough of disillusionment:
The marketing video promised a slick, friendly chatbot. But what’s the reality of Neo?
It starts with Fiverr’s marketing, which – surprise, surprise! – shows off Neo AI as a fast, intelligent bot that remembers past conversations, shows off samples of potential design styles, and machine guns 3 qualified direct to your inbox in the snap of a finger. It even hints that Neo will send a brief for you!
Yeah, no. Neo doesn’t do any of that. The only thing intact from this marketer’s wet dream is Neo’s hyperfocus on getting you to buy stuff.
Badly. If you’re one of those people who thinks ChatGPT is getting dumber, then you haven’t traipsed through the delights of Fiverr’s first attempt at an expert AI system.
No Need to Buckle Up For Fiverr Neo’s Painfully Slow Slow Ride
Used any other AI Assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or even Gemini? These can sometimes slow down, but none of them are as consistently slow as Neo, which even takes time out to tell you that it’s wading through digital molasses.
I am a fairly patient person, but waiting for Neo to respond is a frustrating experience, especially when I could be looking through Fiverr’s marketplace using filters and keywords.The reality is just a few extra seconds – but when our attention span is already shrinkwrapping itself, it may as well be an eon of boredom.
Assuming Neo finds the right freelancer with its first result, it may work out quicker than the old-fashioned way. But if you don’t like the freelancer Neo picks, then you’ll have to wait for Neo to slowly wade over to another pick.
Empires rise and fall quicker than Neo finds a freelancer. Rinse and repeat until you find the perfect match (or die of boredom). It’s not ideal. While freelancers who appear in Neo get the benefit of being promoted by Fiverr’s AI, the user experience leaves a lot to be desired.
Why not show a few more freelancers with each result? Surely it’s capable of doing this? It could in Fiverr’s marketing video! Overall, Neo is a very passive experience where you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for Neo to finish thinking or talking. .
If you don’t take care to include all the basic details Neo needs, you’ll waste a lot of time waiting for Neo to prompt you into telling it what it needs to know. Frankly, it’s quicker to use browse the listings.
This leads me to my biggest problem with Fiverr Neo.
Fiverr Neo Often Gives Inaccurate Information
Neo very, very rarely gets seller location right. This isn’t exclusively a Fiverr problem: all AI hallucinates. The crazy thing about Neo is that it hallucinates over stuff that it should be able to easily observe from a quick look at its knowledge base.
Or am I expecting too much?
It’s not just me. Other people who have played with Fiverr’s AI assistant have noticed the same. it rarely delivers accurate results. I consistently find that if I look for a seller in a specific location, Neo will confidently announce that it has found one. The problem is that while Neo might get other details right, the location is wrong.
It can also get other details wrong.
Perhaps you’re looking for a Top-Rated Seller (TRS), but Neo will give you Level 1 sellers. Fiverr has TRS sellers in virtually all categories, but it won’t always find them.
If it is getting something this basic wrong, what else does Neo get wrong?
Location isn’t necessarily important when searching for a freelancer, unless you need a location-specific service. Fiverr is aware of this issue thanks to complaints on their own forum, but I haven’t noticed any improvement in this area.
Fiverr doesn’t let you use search filter for sellers by location, so this isn’t a “win” for manual search, just a reflection of one of Fiverr’s business decisions. But you can filter for TRS sellers. With all the waiting around you’ll be doing using Neo, it might just be quicker to search Fiverr the old-fashioned way.
Sellers Are Frustrated by Bad Leads from Neo
Fiverr Neo shares one significant issue with Brief and Match – the quality of sellers you’ll be shown to and attract is based on the quality of your brief.
Let’s pretend Fiverr Neo finds a seller who matches your requirements. Neo will send over the brief and you’re ready to get started on your project!
Slow down, there. First, you’re going to need to write a brief.
Neo’s inaccurate results may send you to the wrong seller – who will then reject you. Here’s a typical Neo brief that I rejected in April:
If you didn’t fill out your brief with details beyond what Neo prods you for, a Fiverr seller may reject you due to any number of reasons.
I rejected the brief because:
- I don’t offer PR distribution services on Fiverr
- I don’t offer SEO audits in any capacity
- I do not offer guarantees with any of my gigs
- I would not accept this job at this price
If this buyer had found me through search, they would know this because I explain what my gig offers, what’s not included, and my pricing is clearly visible. This buyer isn’t looking for a writer. They’re looking for someone in SEO who can get spots on all of these sites for backlinks.
We were a terrible fit for each other!
This is just one brief: the others are as bad. It’s hard to tell if this is the buyer’s mistake or Neo’s mistake. Neo puts an unnecessary AI middleman between you and sellers. Due to its unreliability, you will need to do some AI fact-checking and vet sellers to find the best fit for your job anyway. Why not just filter and search for more accurate results then contact people manually?
Despite Neo’s help, it’s missing a lot of AI features that could make it really useful by saving time. Fiverr could improve Neo with one simple tweak that makes Neo to write buyers briefs that you can send to prospective sellers.
There’s just one problem: that feature already exists. It’s called intelligent briefing, it’s limited to Fiverr Pro and not available in all categories. So why not integrate intelligent briefing with Fiverr Neo? Just be warned that AI-written briefs aren’t perfect either!
Fiverr Neo Only Speaks English… By Design
One thing I love about ChatGPT is its language skills. I use it all the time to help me understand unfamiliar phrases and words in Greek. It’s also one of the features that makes my Fiverr TOS Expert tool useful for people who want to understand Fiverr’s TOS better.
Fiverr Neo only speaks English. Personally, I’m OK with that, since that’s my native language. But what about people who don’t speak English well and who may find it challenging to describe what they way?
While I can understand why Fiverr made this choice – it is primarily an English-speaking marketplace – it’s hard to understand why they didn’t integrate other popular languages into the platform. In the screenshot above, I swore at Neo. You’ll see why in a moment!
It doesn’t matter what language you use, you’ll get the same response: I’m sorry, I only speak English.
This simple phrase shows Fiverr has been working on Neo.
Just a couple of months ago, Neo would respond to foreign text in English, demonstrating an understanding of other languages. Below, Neo reacts to some lighthearted Greek swearing (no panagias were harmed) in January 2024:
Fiverr clearly only wants Neo to work in English. That’s a shame, because Neo could be so much more powerful if users could request, say, a video editor and give more specific details about what they want in their own language.
It could also remind users that the seller it has chosen does not speak their language. Maybe one day, it will even offer to translate!
Still, I can understand this decision by Fiverr. Machine translation is not known for its good translations, especially when writers don’t take care to avoid idiomatic expressions. It’s easy to see why Fiverr made Neo a monoglot, but it still feels like a missed trick.
It’s also possible that Fiverr looked into multiple languages, but found that made Neo even slower. Neo is still very much an experiment – which means resources (such as data centers) are limited.
And I suspect that is the reason why Neo just doesn’t deliver on its promise – yet. Fiverr’s stock performance took a severe tumble when it announced its first product release in 2024. Since then, the company has been turning to pinching pennies from annoyed sellers as a source of revenue. It’s possible that Fiverr may not have the funds they need to make their vision for Neo shine.
Fiverr Neo Is a Work In Progress
The Neo we have now isn’t what Fiverr keeps telling us it is (or what it should be). In a Q2 2023 Earnings Call, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman told investors that:
We imagine Neo™ will serve as a personalized recruiting expert that can help our customers more accurately scope their projects and get matched with freelance talent, just like a human recruiter, only with more data and more brain power. What we have done so far is leverage the existing LLM engines to allow customers to express their project needs in natural language, which Neo™ will synthesize and define the scope before matching the client with a short list of choices pulled from the entire Fiverr freelancer database. It’s a substantial step forward from the existing experience and streamlines the time the customer needs to make an informed decision. To improve the experience further, we continue incorporating cutting-edge technology into our production to advance the algorithm and provide a much faster processing speed.
Micha Kaufman (Fiverr Earnings Call Q2 2023) – emphasis mine
Which LLM is Fiverr Neo using? A good guess is Google Gemini, as Neo’s chat icon matches Bard’s. Ultimately though, we don’t know. Neo appears to be an LLM integrated with sellers in the database and possibly other Fiverr algorithms, one of which may be the Success Score.
In an earnings call for Fiverr’s Q1 2024 investors, Kaufman continued to praise Neo’s “natural purchasing path” created by conversational experiences, leading to almost a third of buyers sending a project brief to sellers. Conversions were three times higher than marketplace averages – however, we do not know what the average conversion rate for the Fiverr marketplace is.
One thing is for certain – the faster processing speed Kaufman talked almost a year ago is nowhere to be seen – and the reality falls far short of Kaufman’s vision. It might be cutting-edge technology, but it is awful to use.
Neo Falls Short Of Its 2023 Promise
It’s pretty clear that Neo is still a work in progress as an experiment, so perhaps I shouldn’t to be too harsh on the AI. It certainly has the potential to become an impressive search tool. However, Fiverr’s hype machine has done it a disservice. Like most of Fiverr’s AI efforts recently, I’m left disappointed and frustrated by Fiverr’s apparent blind spot.
Neo is slow, clunky, and inaccurate. It fails to be a significantly better option than regular search while features that could be useful are missing. Neo can understand, but not speak, other languages. Neo can help you to find Fiverr sellers, but not necessarily the right ones.
Neo’s failings are disappointing because Fiverr promised so much more. AI is a field where impressive new ideas and tools emerge all the time. Fiverr created an AI assistant to join the AI hype, but has ended up with something that serves nobody particularly well.
Neo is the sort of AI that might have impressed people in the winter of 2022-2023 when ChatGPT was blowing everyone’s minds away. Today? Not so much. People are used to AI and being able to talk to it like a normal conversation – but Neo’s conversation is stilted and hyperfocused on its mission: to get you to buy something.
Slowly. And, chances are, by sending the wrong buyers to the wrong sellers.
Still, it must be getting something right, as Fiverr is still pushing Neo onto buyers who visit the marketplace. This at least suggests that it must be somewhat successful in its mission to drive sales.
The real question isn’t whether Neo is any good now, but how Fiverr intends to improve it in the near future. I haven’t noticed any big changes since I fight started using it a few months ago. When I do use it, I feel bored and like I’m wasting my time.
This isn’t what Neo should feel like. It fails everyone on the platform – and that’s the biggest problem of all, since Neo mirrors Fiverr’s ongoing problems integrating AI into the marketplace without pissing everyone off.
Have you tried Fiverr Neo? What do you think about it?
