My AI Diary: One day at a time with AI #14

Perplexity As A Digital Assistant

Anyone that knows me well knows that I am NOT a fan of Apple products. It's been a lifetime of annoyance with their products, so when it comes to my phone and tablets, I have been a longtime Samsung/Android user. At home, I also use Amazon's Alexa. Alexa is handy for checking weather, times or scores of games, playing music, turning lights on/off, calling between rooms, or setting alarms and reminders. That accounts for 99% of how the household uses Alexa. Ask Alexa a more complicated question, and it's a flip of the coin at best if you get a reliable answer. In short, Amazon's Alexa is definitely NOT a good personal assistant. Score: F

On my phone, the Google assistant wasn't ever useful for me, and it still isn't. It seems to be getting better, but more on that later. Score: F

Android recently pushed out a numbers of new AI features for the newest model phones; on my phone it's Galaxy AI. These new features are exciting, and while I've only scratched the surface (too early to score), they all seem like they would be useful tools. Tools like real-time translation, writing, browsing, photo and drawing assistants. I can think of good use-cases for all of these. However, I have yet to find a useful AI assistant.

Enter Perplexity. One of the nice features on the Android is that you can set your Digital Assistant. Samsung Galaxy defaults to Google (now Gemini), but it can changed to ChatGPT, Amazon Alexa, Copilot, and Perplexity.

I tried a few basic tasks (note - when it comes to sending a simple text, my 2015 Toyota Highlander performs better):

Voice prompt: What are my important notifications?

While all of the other tools failed in a variety of ways, Perplexity did a solid job on this one. At the time, I had around 50 notifications on my phone (yes, poorly managed for sure). Perplexity was able to parse through those 50 notifications and actually give me the more important ones. It mentioned my payments to American Express, calendar appointments for the day across two calendars (Outlook and Gmail), recent Slack messages, and two reminders that were set on Alexa, that were not in my phone notifications. Score: A-

Voice prompt: Draft an email to Jeffrey Shaffer. (with body of email dictated. note - I did not spell out the name)

This was poorly executed. It drafted the email perfectly, but interpreted my name as Jeffrey Schaefer or some variation. It didn't use contacts, it just took a guess at an email address. Score: F

Voice prompt: Draft an email to Jeff. (with body of email dictated)

This was better, as it used my phone contacts, but then there was a series of questions. Which Jeff? Which email? Then I had to select the email application because I use Outlook and Gmail. If I only used one email application, or wanted to set a default, then it would at least skip that step. Score: B-

Voice prompt: Draft an text to Mary. (with body of email dictated)

This was better than email, but still required follow up questions. Which Mary? Which phone number?

I have a ton more to explore, but so far, Perplexity has been the best digital assistant I've tried on my phone. Chats are saved in threads in Perplexity, so I can easily access them. I tried to set up custom instructions so that it would default to Mary (my wife) with her email and phone, but it could not do this. However, custom instructions appear to be set globally for Perplexity, meaning they will be applied to all of my searches. It might be possible to set other instructions based on a keyword, but I have not explored this.

Overall, personal digital assistants have a long way to go, so I will be grading this one harshly.

ChatGPT "drafted a text" as if I were just writing an essay. It had no concept of using an app to actually send the text message. Score: F

The default Google Gemini was at least able to send an actual text message, but it was a process. Score: D.

Out of all of them, Perplexity tops the list at the moment. It's usable and somewhat useful, so better than an F. Still, I imagine Apple's Siri would score better on similar tasks. Score: C-

Setting Up Perplexity As A Digital Assistant

For Android users, here are the instructions for setting up Perplexity as your digital assistant on Android.

For those of you who are Apple users (I will pray for you), you can also try Perplexity as your digital assistant too. Here are the instructions to set up Perplexity on iOS.