Use Perplexity Ai Voice Assistant If You’re Tired of Siri
Siri is struggling. He has difficulty answering simple questions or creating simple calendar events. And there’s still no end in sight, as Apple has largely delayed the release of Apple Intelligence’s “smarter Siri” until the end of the year .
Meanwhile, Perplexity AI’s new voice assistant is here, trying to capitalize on Apple’s mess. In addition to answering questions, the new AI voice mode can create calendar events and reminders, play music, and more. It can carry on conversations and even perform some web tasks. These are things that Siri simply can’t do, at least not yet.
How to Use Perplexity Voice Assistant on iOS
Download and open the latest version of the Perplexity app. In the Ask Anything panel on the right, you’ll see an animated waveform icon. This is a shortcut for the voice assistant.
Just click on it and start talking. Perplexity will show an animation when you speak and when he responds to you. There is also an option to mute the microphone for longer chats.
This is more of a conversation space, so you can keep talking as long as Perplexed answers. Tap the gear icon at the top to go to settings. Here you can disable the transcription feature or enable push-to-talk mode. You can also change the Assistant’s voice.
Voice mode runs in the background and only stops when you press the X button in the app. This way, you can start voice mode, switch to another app, and continue chatting with Perplexity in the background if you want.
For faster access, you should add the Medium Perplexity widget to your home screen as it has a shortcut for voice mode. Alternatively, you can create a shortcut and add it to your Home screen, Lock screen, Control Center, or even the Action button (to set this up, follow this guide ).
What Perplexity Does Better Than Siri
Perplexity integrates directly with standard Apple apps such as Calendar, Reminders, Mail, Contacts and more. If you give it permission, Perplexity can add events to your calendar, remind you about something, and even create emails and text messages.
As it stands, Perplexity also has a better knowledge base than Siri because it is connected to the Internet. So a question like “when was the Pixel 4a released” gets an instant response, while a Siri question requires confirmation via ChatGPT.
In testing, I found Perplexity to be reliable at creating calendar events and reminders, more than I often get with Siri.
Writing an email shows the stark difference between the two approaches. I used the same prompt for both Siri and Perplexity: write an email asking if he’s ready to play Pickleball this weekend. Siri took this literally and wrote an email saying, “Is he ready to play pickleball this weekend.” That’s it. Perplexity, on the other hand, expanded this into a coherent sentence, added a topic, and featured an input field. All I had to do was change my name and hit send (Siri also doesn’t send the email without your confirmation).
My experience with text messaging has been more iffy. Perplexity was unable to simply message Pranay, even though I gave him full access to my contacts (if you don’t want to do that, you can dictate your email address or phone number instead). Hopefully this is a day one issue and will be resolved later.
Perplexity’s voice assistant can also play music directly from Apple Music using voice commands. And because Perplexity integrates with YouTube, it finds YouTube videos pretty quickly. I asked it to find a soothing video about the hidden art of ceramics in Japan, and within seconds Perplexity started playing the video inside the app.
It’s Baffling What Siri Just Can’t Do
Perplexity’s voice assistant can communicate with you with ease. It’s a very fluid back and forth: the assistant remembers the details you asked earlier, knows the context of your prompts, and responds accordingly. There’s just no need to ask clarifying questions.
This is great for asking general questions and learning new things. Instead of a 500-word answer, Perplexity’s AI assistant will give you a couple of sentences and encourage you to ask follow-up questions, sometimes even giving you hints about what you might want to ask next.
Confusion can also take action online, but the final action must be taken by you, which is fair (and, frankly, welcome).
For example, I asked Perplexity to make a reservation at White Olive at 8 pm in New York and it opened Open Table with all the details already filled out. I had to confirm the details and complete the booking myself. I then asked if Perplexity could call me for Uber and he opened the Uber app with the location of the White Olive restaurant.
This is what Siri with Apple Intelligence should be able to do for you, but we won’t see these features until at least the end of the year, and we have no idea how exactly they will work.
Transparency and consistency are important
In my limited hands-on testing, I noticed that Perplexity’s responses were more consistent than Siri’s, and since voice mode remains active by default, I asked subtle questions without feeling like I had to rush like I do with Siri.
Siri is sometimes great and sometimes just unresponsive. Confusion solves this problem. Of course, there have been times when Confusion has hit a wall, such as with my question about text messages. And here he calmly told me that he could not complete the task and that he could try again if I wanted. Hopefully these minor issues will be resolved with new updates.
Of course, Perplexity can’t replace Siri in the true sense of the word because Apple won’t allow it. Only Siri can access OS-level features like changing toggles, settings, calling someone, replying to text messages, setting alarms, etc. But otherwise, if you’re frustrated by Siri’s limitations, Perplexity’s voice assistant is definitely worth a try.