The next phase of AI evolution appears to focus on agents: AI robots that can not only chat with you and draw pictures, but also perform tasks on your behalf. These new AI tools won’t be able to tell you about the best hotels near your next vacation destination – they will be able to book you.
These types of multimodal agents are being worked on at Google, Openai and others, and now Perplexity has announced Perplexity Wizard for Android (depending on The penisPerplexity says that iOS doesn’t give apps the necessary operating system hooks for an iPhone version to be possible at this time).
You can find the wizard in the main Perplexity app for Androidand it is available to use whether you use perplexity for free or pay a subscription. You’ll see a pop-up ad for the Perplexity Assistant in the app that you can tap to activate it, or you can find it by tapping on your profile picture (top left), then Activate the wizard.
During the setup process, you will be prompted to set Perplexity Assistant as the default assistant on Android, instead of Google Assistant or Google Gemini. This is the same process as setting any other assistant as default, and you will be taken to the correct screen: this means you can launch Perplexity Assistant with whatever the assistant shortcut is (like a long press on 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 lower right corner to type instead. There are no settings to manage, but there is a button in the lower left corner to switch to camera mode, which lets you ask Perplexity Assistant about anything in your environment.
You will need to set the Perplexity helper as the default helper.
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What you can do with the Perplexity Wizard
The puzzlement hasn’t been too much to appear in terms of what you can actually do with his new assistant, but it mentioned Book dinner (via OpenTable), play songs (in Spotify and YouTube), call taxis (via Uber), write emails, and set 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 choice, then load Google Maps. It’s debatable whether this is faster or more convenient than doing the whole process through Google Maps, but it works well.
I was also able to call up songs and playlists in Spotify, but again, Spotify’s built-in search tools do all of that pretty well anyway. It’s not yet an omnipotent digital assistant, however, if you ask Perplexity Assistant to order something for you from Amazon, it will simply direct you to the relevant registration pages.
Spotify is one of the apps that Perplexity Assistant can control.
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Another test I performed was getting a puzzled assistant to write an email apologizing for being late, and with a task like this, the AI’s generating capabilities can come in handy . The assistant found the right contact, composed a short email with my apologies, and loaded a project into the Gmail app, ready to go – although if you’re really sorry for a recent lack of punctuality, it’s probably a better idea to actually write the apology yourself.
That’s more evidence of where AI assistants are headed, but they’ll need to be granted the relevant hooks in other apps – like OpenTable and Spotify – in order to work properly. They will also need to be reliable and accurate enough to gain user trust, which has traditionally been a problem for AI: you don’t want your middleman-only dinner recommendations to be for the wrong week or in the wrong City, for example.
