Interestingly, these interactions do not require opening the Perplexity app. All queries can be made directly from the home screen. In addition, it is possible to bounce back from a previous request to perform a new action. If you want to reserve the best Italian restaurant for a specific date, the assistant will search in the background and make the reservation on OpenTable. You can then ask it to add an event to your calendar while inviting one or more people.
Better still, the Perplexity assistant is multimodal. Commands can then be initiated directly from the smartphone's camera to, for example, ask it for reading suggestions similar to this book that you took a photo of or to translate a document.
While Open AI reserves the new features for premium members, the Perplexity assistant is free and available to everyone. All you have to do is change the default assistant on the Android smartphone. Aravind Srinivas explains that Google or Gemini assistants are much less powerful than Perplexity. He emphasizes that manufacturers keep the Google search engine by default because it is a condition of the American giant to be able to use the Play Store. Direct access to Perplexity will, however, change things a bit.
