Perplexity Bows Real-Time AI Search Tool, Android Assistant
January 27, 2025
Perplexity joins the list of AI companies launching agents, debuting the Perplexity Assistant for Android. The tool uses reasoning, search, browsers and apps to help mobile users with daily tasks. Concurrently, Perplexity — independently founded in 2022 as a conversational AI search engine — has launched an API called Sonar intended for enterprise and developers who want real-time intelligent search, taking on heavyweights like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. While to date AI search has largely been limited to answers informed by training data, which freezes their knowledge in time, next-gen tools can pull from the Internet in real time.
VentureBeat calls Sonar “an aggressive bid to capture the enterprise AI search market” with an API service “that outperforms offerings from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on key benchmarks while also undercutting their prices.”
Perplexity is offering two versions of Sonar, a lightweight, more affordable version, and Sonar Pro for those with more complex needs.
“The Sonar Pro API can handle in-depth, multi-step queries with added extensibility, like double the number of citations per search as Sonar on average. Plus, with a larger context window, it can handle longer and more nuanced searches and follow-up questions,” Perplexity explains in a blog post.
TechCrunch reports the pricing, which starts at $5 for every 1,000 searches, and $1 each for every 750,000 words input and every 750,000 words the model returns. Sonar Pro has the same base rate for search, plus $3 for every 750,000 type into the AI and $15 for every 750,000 words returned.
Since the Pro model runs multiple searches for each user prompt, “the pricing could be more unpredictable,” TechCrunch notes.
Sonar’s launch “comes at a pivotal moment in the AI industry, when companies are increasingly seeking ways to integrate AI search capabilities into their products,” VentureBeat observes, pointing out that Perplexity has provided “benchmarks showing Sonar Pro achieving an 85.8 F-score on the SimpleQA benchmark — significantly outperforming GPT-4o and Claude” and positioning Perplexity “to capitalize on growing enterprise demand for accurate, citation-backed AI responses.”
As for the Perplexity Assistant, TechCrunch reports it is “multimodal in the sense that it can use your phone’s camera to answer questions about what’s around you or on your screen.” The assistant is also able to maintain context from one task to another, “letting you, for example, have Perplexity Assistant research restaurants in your area and reserve a table automatically.”
As of November, Perplexity was closing a $500 million funding round that gave it a $9 billion valuation, according to CNBC.
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