Perplexity announced that its AI answer engine has been upgraded to Android Mobile Assistant, providing users with a more convenient AI service experience. This assistant can not only answer questions, but also complete a variety of tasks, such as writing emails, setting reminders and booking restaurants, which greatly improves user efficiency. It also has multimodal functions, which can recognize objects in the real world through the camera and interact with a variety of applications, such as Uber, Spotify, and YouTube, bringing users a completely new way of interaction.
Perplexity upgrades its AI "Answer Engine" to a mobile assistant on Android. This new assistant can answer general questions from users and perform various tasks on behalf of users, such as writing emails, setting reminders, booking dinners and more.
Perplexity's assistant also has multimodal function, where users can not only ask what is displayed on the assistant's screen, but also let the assistant "see" what is in front of them by turning on the camera.
In a demonstration, the user simply asks the assistant to "call a car", and the assistant will automatically open the Uber app and display available ride options to help the user find the destination quickly. The reporter personally experienced this assistant, and the effect was impressive. When asked about Assistant "playing a nice podcast," the Assistant quickly opened YouTube and played the latest episode of Joe Rogan Experience, responding quite quickly, although the show of its choice may be somewhat controversial.
In addition, using a phone camera, Perplexity’s assistant successfully identified the promotional version of the Pokémon card that the reporter got in McDonald’s Happy Meal, which was a surprise, as the promotion has just begun. In addition, the assistant also helped the reporter write and send a text message to his family, which is very practical.
When Samsung released the Galaxy S25 equipped with Gemini, Google also revealed that its AI assistant can complete tasks across multiple applications and can handle multimodal requests. However, Perplexity’s Assistant does not currently support all applications and features, such as the inability to access Slack or Reddit, and journalists are unable to use the Assistant to leave messages under YouTube videos. Currently, the assistant supports Spotify, YouTube, Uber, and applications such as email, messaging and clocks, and Perplexity spokesman Sara Platnick said they will continue to add support for more applications and features.
Users can enable this assistant through the Perplexity app, which prompts the user to replace the default assistant of the phone with the Perplexity assistant. After that, users can access the Assistant by simply swiping or long pressing the Home button in the lower left corner of the screen. Currently, the assistant does not support iPhones yet, Platnick said: "If Apple gives us the corresponding permissions, we will implement this feature."
Points:
Perplexity's AI assistant supports features such as writing emails, setting reminders and booking restaurants.
The assistant has multimodal functions to recognize screen content and identify surrounding things through the camera.
Currently, the Assistant supports applications including Spotify, YouTube and Uber, which are still expanding.
Perplexity's Android AI Assistant demonstrates the strong application potential of AI technology on the mobile side, and its multimodal functions and cross-application operation capabilities bring unprecedented convenience to users. Although it is still in the development stage, its future development is worth looking forward to. I believe that with the continuous improvement of functions, it will bring users a smarter and more convenient mobile experience.