“Perplexity Assistant” Uses Artificial Intelligence to Help You Complete Tasks on Your Android
The next stage in the evolution of AI appears to be centered on agents: AI bots that can not only talk to you and draw pictures, but also perform tasks on your behalf . These new AI tools won’t just be able to tell you the best hotels near your next vacation – they’ll be able to book you a reservation.
Google, OpenAI, and others are working on these kinds of multimodal agents, and now Perplexity has announced Perplexity Assistant for Android (according to The Verge , Perplexity claims that iOS doesn’t give apps the necessary connections to the iPhone operating system). version will be possible right now).
You can find the assistant in the main Perplexity Android app , and it can be used whether you use Perplexity for free or pay for a subscription. In the app, you’ll see a pop-up advertising Perplexity Assistant, which you can tap to enable, or find it by tapping your profile picture (top left) and then Turn on Assistant .
During the installation process, you will be prompted to set Perplexity Assistant as your default assistant on Android instead of Google Assistant or Google Gemini. This is the same process as setting up any other assistant by default , and you will be redirected to the right screen: this means you can launch Perplexity Assistant using any assistant shortcut (such as long pressing the power button). .
When the assistant is active, you can use your voice to interact with it or give it commands, or tap the keyboard icon in the bottom right corner to enter text instead. There are no settings to control, but there is a button in the bottom left corner to switch to camera mode, which allows you to ask Perplexity Assistant about everything around you.
What you can do with Perplexity Assistant
Perplexity isn’t too revealing in terms of what you can actually do with the new assistant, but it does mention ordering dinner (via OpenTable), playing songs (via Spotify and YouTube), calling a taxi (via Uber), composing emails, and setting reminders. You can see some examples here . It’s worth experimenting to see what it can and can’t do on your phone.
You can ask for directions to a good coffee shop nearby, for example: Perplexity Assistant will search the web for recommendations, ask you to make a selection, and then load Google Maps. It’s debatable whether this will be faster or more convenient than simply doing the entire process through Google Maps, but it works reliably.
I was also able to recall songs and playlists in Spotify, although, again, Spotify’s built-in search tools do all of this pretty well anyway. It’s not an all-powerful digital assistant yet, though—if you ask Perplexity Assistant to order you something from Amazon, it will simply direct you to the relevant listing pages.
Another test I ran was getting Perplexity Assistant to compose an email apologizing for being late, a task where generative AI capabilities can be useful. The assistant found the right contact, drafted a short email with my apology, and loaded the draft into the Gmail app, ready to go. Although, if you really regret your recent lack of punctuality, it’s probably better to write a direct apology yourself.
This is another sign of where AI assistants are heading, but to work properly they need to be given the proper capabilities to connect to other apps like OpenTable and Spotify. They also need to be reliable and accurate enough to gain user trust, which has traditionally been a challenge for AI : you don’t want your AI-booked dinner recommendations to be for the wrong week or the wrong week. city, for example.