Perplexity AI assistant goes head-to-head with Google's Gemini

While AI Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude have established their place in the market as general-purpose tools - Perplexity has carved out a niche for one specific function: AI-powered search.

While most tools have some capability to scour the internet for search results, Perplexity takes this process a little bit further, offering comprehensively sourced answers with a heavily research-focused functionality. As part of Perplexity's strategy to expand into a broader AI ecosystem - a new app entitled 'Perplexity Assistant' was released on the Google Play Store.

The Assistant utilizes reasoning, search, and apps, to help with daily tasks ranging from simple questions to multi-app actions. Allowing users to, for example, book dinner, find a forgotten song, call an Uber, and more. Recently, at Samsung Unpacked, we saw Google Gemini's assistant on full display, boasting a range of similar-sounding capabilities. Most notable was the ability to 'chain together' tasks. For example, asking Gemini to search for restaurants near you, and to send that to a specific contact in a text message.

Whether Perplexity's Assistant can match or exceed the capabilities of the larger players in the AI assistant market is yet to be seen. However, if it performs as promised, it undoubtedly has a chance to become a major player in the AI assistant arms race.