Not everything has to be ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Copilot. There are actually tons of cool AI chatbots you can check out these days. Perplexity is generally regarded as one of the best ones, and it has now just launched an AI assistant for smartphones as well.
Perplexity turned its AI chatbot into a nifty phone assistant that can replace Google Assistant/Gemini on your smartphone. You can ask it basically anything you would ask your standard assistant, such as “How’s the weather?” or to play you a song. It has a few app integrations under its belt, too—it’s able to play Spotify songs and podcasts, and its able to go into Uber and reserve a ride. It’s pretty cool. And it’s multimodal, which means that it can scan your screen and analyze pictures you take if you need help in that regard.
The assistant itself feels pretty natural to use and, if it had more app integrations, it could be a very nice alternative to Gemini. I actually use Gemini’s Assistant mode a fair bit, and I gave Perplexity’s assistant a spin to see if maybe it’s better. It’s not quite there yet, but it certainly has potential. I compared both assistants and found that Gemini still does some things better—mainly regarding integrations with other Google apps. But Perplexity is also quite good and even outperforms it in some scenarios.
With a little more polish (I’ve found that, occasionally, it can get stuck while performing actions even when it knows what it should do), I think it can be a really solid option if you’re looking for something smart to replace your phone’s regular assistant with. Perplexity has been geared from the beginning as an accuracy-focused AI product, so it makes sense that the philosophy also translates to its AI assistant.
I asked both Gemini and Perplexity to pull up the latest album from Bad Bunny which, as of the time of writing, was released roughly three weeks ago. Since it’s a relatively recent music release, it was a good way to see how well both assistants are caught up with modern times. Perplexity successfully searched for the latest album on Spotify and began playing a random song from it, while Gemini began playing an older album from 2023 without giving it much thought—although it did correct itself once I questioned it. I re-tried it a few times and every single time it pulled up the older album first. Gemini may be just playing what its knowledge base says the latest album is rather than just searching for it, which is what Perplexity did.
There is some stuff that Gemini still does better. For one, I asked both Gemini and Perplexity to give me directions to the nearest McDonalds, which is about 1 mile away. Gemini gave me directions to one that’s located 3.6 miles away from my location—not the absolute nearest, but still decently close. Perplexity seems to have not really taken a lot of consideration about my actual location other than the city I was in, so it gave me directions to one located around 10 miles away. It’s probably not the first one I’d go to in a pinch.
I also found Perplexity is able to give accurate insights into places and objects more frequently than Gemini, and the assistant itself feels more conversational, while Gemini still feels as essentially an extension of the chat interface—despite Gemini Live being a thing for months. Again, with a little more polish and maybe more app integrations, this could be a killer assistant.
You can check out Perplexity’s assistant within the Perplexity Android app—it’ll prompt you to set it up once you log in. It’s not available on iOS just yet, and we don’t know when it might be released.
Source: Perplexity
