Perplexity AI is a free AI chatbot that is connected to the internet, provides sources, and has a very enjoyable UI. As soon as you visit the site, using the chatbot is straightforward and easy to use. All you have to do is type in your prompt into the ask anything box to get started.
How is Perplexity AI different from ChatGPT?
ChatGPT and Perplexity are conversational AI tools, but they differ in functionality due to a difference in design philosophy. ChatGPT is more of your traditional AI chatbot.
Perplexity AI is more of a search engine that provides suggestions and sources in response to your queries. It is designed to search the web in real-time to provide up-to-date information on various topics. The new GPT-4 powered Copilot feature is also useful as it can guide your search experience with interactive inputs to tailor personalized responses.
Both of them are useful AI tools for entirely different purposes. Perplexity is a great free tool for conducting research, while ChatGPT can help you summarize that research and make it presentable.
Is the Perplexity AI free to use?
Luckily, Perplexity AI is free and doesn’t need an account. Try it out.
How is Perplexity AI different from other chatbots?
Perplexity AI’s founders claim that their tool is more accurate than others, and user reviews seem to support this sentiment. Of course, Perplexity AI is still an AI-based tool and might be as prone to hallucinations as any other tool out there. But the answers it provides are always supported by sources and citations, which you can easily click to verify the answers it provides.
How does Perplexity AI work?
Perplexity uses a combination of both indexing/ ranking and LLM-based search to solve your queries.
When you ask a question, Perplexity first performs a search for the query. It looks into the search index and pulls relevant web pages, such as the top web pages and featured snippets for the query.
Next, it passes it to the LLM chatbot, which then combs through the web pages and finds the exact information relevant to the question.
This way, it can strike a perfect balance between a canonical search engine, which users tend to trust but which isn’t as useful as you have to go through links to find the answers you’re looking for, and an LLM model, which is quick to provide answers but is not as trustworthy as a search engine.
You can use Perplexity AI by either navigating to their website from your browser or using the mobile app. For this guide, we’ll showcase it from the website.
On your preferred browser, navigate to perplexity.ai. Now, you can directly start using the tool without any additional hassle.
Similar to Google, it has a search bar, front and center. Simply type your question into the search bar and press Enter.