
Perplexity has announced its own assistant for Android devices, called Perplexity Assistant. The assistant is similar to Google's AI-powered Gemini assistant, which is on its way to replace the original Google Assistant on Android devices.
Perplexity Assistant isn't just for answering questions anymore. It can now perform actions as well. The assistant uses reason, search, and collaborate with apps to help with daily tasks such as booking a dinner reservation, finding a forgotten song, calling a ride, drafting emails, setting reminders, and more.
Perplexity showcased a bunch of examples on X where its assistant was able to set a reminder, search for restaurants, and even open the camera to describe what's in front of you.
Assistant is multimodal, so you can tell it to turn on the camera and ask about what you see in front of you, or on your screen. pic.twitter.com/Jxg6m6WUV3
— Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) January 23, 2025
Aravind Srinivas, founder of Perplexity, posted on X how the Perplexity Assistant can understand the context and take actions based on that. He also acknowledged that not everything will work smoothly, for example, you might not be able to book a reservation if a restaurant of your choice isn't listed on OpenTable.
Cool thing about this is everything stays in context. You can start with a conversation about some question you have and follow up to set an action related to it, e.g., getting an alert ahead of a basketball game. pic.twitter.com/3E6nSADhQ0
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) January 23, 2025
The assistant also currently doesn't have read access to Calendar and Gmail but Srinivas assured that it's a work in progress and that support should be rolling out within the next three weeks. Perplexity Assistant can still summarize unread emails and upcoming calendar appointments via notifications.
Perplexity Assistant is free for all Perplexity users and is available on its Android app starting today. To use Perplexity Assistant on your Android device, you first need to download Perplexity AI's app on your device, and then set the default assistant app on your device to Perplexity. Once done, you can invoke the assistant just like you would normally do by holding the power button for a few seconds.
2 Comments - Add comment