How to use Perplexity AI?

Perplexity AI: The Perfect Research Tool

What is Perplexity AI? Research forms an essential part of writing. Be it your thesis or a blog, good, sound, and in-depth research add more meat to your content. Most writers acknowledge that but only a few comply. Because it can get very tricky as to which sources you should trust, how to collate information across multiple webpages, and how to make information collection not tiresome. There is no denying, Research can be Perplexing!

End result: With the deadline on the horizon, you have dozens of tabs in your browser, little to no time, and a frenzy to complete the article with half-baked concepts, incorrect information, and poorly structured final piece.

In comes, Perplexity AI; a perfect online information retrieval platform that makes research fun, easy and time-effective.

What is Perplexity AI?

Built on similar platforms like Open AI, Perplexity AI is a generative AI. Meaning, it generates content. But also, cites the sources. This is an incredibly smart function. For every line the tool generates, Perplexity AI provides numbered references. These citations come from a bunch of other web platforms and provide the link to the sources. Having the link to the source helps you to check the accuracy of the fact. And, you can explore the source for some additional information related to the topic.

If the sources are outdated or not relevant, the feedback loop means you can red-flag the generation, allowing Perplexity AI to refine the result for future searches.

What are the advantages of using Perplexity AI?

Unlike any other AI application, Perplexity AI offers some unique advantages:

1. Easy to cite sources: When you are writing your thesis, or a blog, many a times, it might become cumbersome to maintain the list of your citations. Bibliography is one of the most challenging things to maintain. Keep it for the end means missing out on mentioning a key source. With Perplexity AI, it is very simple and easy as it provides you with citations for every sentence it generates.

2. Generates results from multiple sources: You can select the type of information to pull in from. The database generates results from all major web platforms like Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia, Academic Literatures and research papers, YouTube, Reddit and more.

3. Transcripts for YouTube videos: Perplexity AI can also generate transcripts from across YouTube videos. It analyzes YouTube and displays the video for reference and generate the transcript for the video.

4. Get relevant academic publications and journals: Perplexity AI is very useful for students pursuing grads or PhD. It can generate and cite scientific publications, journal articles, and dissertations that are extremely helpful to underline arguments with significant evidence.

5. Refer to Related Queries: Apart from generating content for the prompt along with the citations, Perplexity AI also helps you with related queries similar to what Google does with related searches. This feature can help spark an idea or give more matter for you to speak about in your written piece.

6. Ask follow-up queries: Like ChatGPT, it keeps a tab on the conversion and hence, follow-up questions can be asked to the system that will generate responses based on your previous prompts.

7. Pull up recent studies from your field of research: Just type in recent papers and articles on the topic of your choice. And viola! The AI will display results that are recent, giving you a detailed glance into what’s trending.

But that’s not all.

Best Features

Apart from the features talked above, the best features of Perplexity AI make it very handy for writers and researchers.

1. Chrome Extension:

This is hands down the best feature of Perplexity AI. Install Perplexity AI in your Google Chrome browser. And then ask a question. It will prompt relevant sources. Click on the sources and open the webpage. Then you can ask it to summarize the content of the webpage and customize your search area. This is a time saving feature.

When you are hitting your deadline and you do not have the luxury to go through the entire blog or the research paper. Simply, ask the AI to summarize the webpage content. You can do this for a specific webpage or the entire domain.

2. Profile:

A new and recent feature of the platform, this tool lets users create their own profile. Tell the AI more about yourself to get more personalized results. You can share anything that you think will make your experience better.

For example, update your profile with details about User Experience Working Expertise. Now, if you need content for social media, it will take into account the user preferences you have defined and generate results that are oriented to user-experience working expertise. Get as creative as you can get for this part.

All these features with a simple FREE account. Yes, you’ve heard me right. No subscription, no splashing of student’s pocket money. However, if you do insist on getting a more advanced outcome, you can opt for Pro that comes with ChatGPT-4.

How is Perplexity AI different from ChatGPT?

While ChatGPT generates content for you, Perplexity AI goes a step further and cites the source as well. You can also summarize webpage content with the Google Chrome extension. Both are comparable but based on the user end-result, the usage may differ. If you are writing a research paper or a guest blog, it will come handier. If you are looking to generate ideas in general, GPT should be able to handle that better.

How to use Perplexity AI?

These generative AI applications are very user-friendly and hence do not pose any complexities for users.

Step 1:
To begin with, you can sign up. Once email is verified, you will be able to see this dashboard:

Step 2:

Type in your prompt.

Step 3:

Choose your Focus from All/Academic/Wolfram Alpha/YouTube/Reddit or Upload a File to source from and hit enter.

Step 4:

Verify the text generated and cross-refer with the sources. Click on the sources to explore more.

In Conclusion

Perplexity AI is far surpassing the traditional search engines as it saves time, provides more accuracy than ChatGPT and gives you the links to the sources for additional cross-referencing and validation. All-in-all, it saves a lot of time for research while helping you write factually correct blogs or papers.

Perplexity AI is a highly recommended AI tool every writer/researcher must explore.