Perplexity Launches Assistant With AI Agent Features For Android
Contents
Although lesser known than OpenAI and Google among the mainstream public, Perplexity is one of the prominent names in the artificial intelligence industry. Currently, the company’s flagship product is the AI model Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It also offers an AI-powered search engine, something its direct rivals want to achieve. Now, Perplexity has launched an Android assistant app with AI agent-based capabilities.
Perplexity Assistant is now available on Android
Perplexity Assistant is capable of taking “multi-app actions” to offer a truly useful tool for your day-to-day life. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, said that the app can take tasks like “booking an Uber, finding dinner tables, playing an old YouTube video, playing songs, getting directions, and translating Shakespeare,” among others.
Perplexity integrated its own AI-powered search engine to pull results from the web. It has multimodal capabilities that enable it to answer questions about objects in front of you or your surroundings using your phone’s camera. Plus, the assistant can maintain context between different actions. This enables multiple use cases, such as asking the assistant about a basketball game and then receiving alerts about it. You can also ask it to find a restaurant to dine at and then reserve a table.
Users of the AI platform can get the Perplexity Assistant app for free on Android right now. It supports up to 15 languages, including English, Spanish, German, Hindi, French, Korean, and Japanese.
As this is an early release, not everything will work perfectly on the first try. In fact, Srinivas himself said in separate X/Twitter posts that some Perplexity Assistant actions “[might] not always work.” However, he also said that the company is working on addressing any issues that may arise.
It wants to replace Google Assistant and Gemini on your phone
Regardless, Perplexity’s CEO is very proud of the company’s assistant. “This marks the transition for Perplexity from an answer engine to a natively integrated assistant that can call other apps and perform basic tasks for you,” Srinivas said. He even said that moving from Google Assistant or Gemini is “a no-brainer because neither of those assistants can handle the tasks Perplexity Assistant can.“
