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Even as Google continues to struggle with the roll-out of AI Overviews, competitor Perplexity, which has built an AI-native search experience from scratch, is picking up pace with a focus on utility-driven capabilities.
Today, as the next step in this work, the Aravind Srinivas-led startup announced the launch of Pages, a tool to transform disorganized AI knowledge and research into easily digestible articles and reports for sharing.
We’re excited to roll out Perplexity Pages, a simple way to turn your research into visually appealing articles. With formatted images and sections, Pages lets you share in-depth knowledge on any topic. Available now for Pro users and rolling out to all users soon! pic.twitter.com/niSiXxpX09
— Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) May 30, 2024
The offering is rolling out to all Perplexity users starting today. At the core, it transforms Perplexity into an end-to-end solution, where users can search for answers and explore new topics and then share those learnings with the world, with minimal effort.
Perplexity says Pages can empower creators in any field, including educators, researchers and hobbyists, to accelerate their projects.
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The company also gave VentureBeat early access to the feature to test out how it really works when handling different types of content.
Making knowledge sharing simpler
When someone uses Perplexity, or any other AI-driven tool, for research purposes, the process usually revolves around back-and-forth interaction with the said tool.
They give an initial prompt, get an answer and then continue the conversation with follow-ups to learn as much as possible about the subject at hand. Perplexity describes these knowledge discovery conversations as “Threads.”
Now, in its current form, Perplexity allows users to share the links to individual answers from Threads, but not the entire conversation. This is because while threads are good enough for personal consumption, they are often unorganized and not ready for sharing with the public.
Pages solve this exact problem.
The capability allows users to convert their research in Threads into well-organized, impactful content tailored for any audience—beginners, experts, or anyone in between. All the user has to do is hit the ‘Convert to Page’ button on top of the conversation and the tool will collate all information into comprehensive content that’s engaging, visually rich and easy to understand.
In VB’s tests, the tool was able to curate articles from existing Perplexity threads in a matter of seconds.
However, what stood out even more was that users can go and create pages from scratch. They just have to describe the topic of research, select the target audience and the underlying models (which can be changed from settings) will produce an in-depth article, complete with a clear title explaining the topic, subheadings, associated media and relevant citations to the sources of information.
Moreover, Perplexity also provides users with full control over the generated pages. They can rearrange the order of sections, change the layout of the header image, or generate fresh header and section images with the help of AI.
On the content side, users get the option to insert new sections by describing what they’d like to add (text, media or text with media) or edit existing ones by simply highlighting and describing what they want to change, like whether they want to change the language or tone of the section or want it to be more concise/detailed. They can even change the format of sections, converting it into a table or list as needed.
No option to edit manually
In most cases, the models produced the desired content, be it images or text, but what we found missing was the option to edit the content manually.
AI can hallucinate at times and users may want to edit a section or two to add clarifications or make the content more relevant to the audience.
That said, once the format and content of the article are finalized, it can be published to Perplexity’s open library of user-generated content and shared directly with the target audience. The company has not shared how many pages have been published in beta, but given the rise of AI research and the need to share it, we expect users will adopt it quickly.
For instance, students or educators could use it to develop knowledge guides, travel agents could use it to build custom itineraries and businesses could create knowledge documents for their employees, guiding them to best practices.
The development further strengthens Perplexity’s position in the AI search domain, better positioning the platform against GPT-4-driven Microsoft Copilot and Google’s Gemini. Before this, the startup announced an enterprise-centric plan with a focus on privacy and security as well as partnerships with Japan’s SoftBank Corp. and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom to expand its reach.
