Perplexity

Chelsea Potter

What is the tool?

Perplexity is a conversational search engine powered by AI. While I don't have much experience with AI (apart for some brief exploration with Chat GPT), what is unique to this tool is that it cites its sources and provides links within the text response to these sources. This tool is supposed to be especially helpful for more in-depth research. So far, it feels very user friendly, and when you sign up it saves your "conversations" so you can refer back to what you learned.

What does it do for us?

Perplexity combines conversational AI with search engine capabilities, unlike traditional AI tools. This allows the tool to provide more up-to-date information as opposed to simple pre-programmed responses. According to the tool itself (yes, I asked it how it can help me and what its coolest capabilities are), it has a few core functions.

Answers Questions: Perplexity can understand complex questions and provide concise answers. It pulls information from sources across the internet in real-time and cites them, ensuring some amount of transparency. It also remembers the context of ongoing conversations, allowing for easy follow-up questions. It can also provide real-time updates on things like sports scores or weather.
Task Automation: Perplexity can perform practical tasks like booking reservations, setting reminders, drafting emails, requesting rides, and even analyzing content or identifying objects using a device’s camera (pretty cool right??). It can even interact with other apps on your device to complete these tasks.
Deep Research: For complex questions, Perplexity offers "Deep Research" mode, which conducts extensive searches across multiple sources and synthesizes reports in only a few minutes. Users can even customize searches by focusing on specific sites or databases (like academic journals!!) for more targeted results. This sounds like it would be so helpful in conducting a literature review!

Here is a screenshot of my computer when I asked it to "search academic journals for the topic of non-traditional clinical placements for nursing students". It took about 30 seconds to create this report with links to articles. Granted, it cannot access journals that require subscriptions, so it's information gathering capacity is limited. But, it could be very helpful for knowing where to look for articles and how to start organizing your search.

It also has a section at the end of the response that offers other questions related to the topic you searched. You can click on the different questions and the AI assistant will attempt to answer them.

You can also export your searches into another form such as a PDF, copy the link to the search, and share it with others.

*DISCLAIMER*

While you all know this, I think it is important to mention that our work should never be substituted with AI responses. Given all that AI can do these days, I think it could be tempting to rely too much on AI. Not only is this dishonest, but it really hurts ourselves in the long run, as we should be developing and maintaining important skills and engaging in the process of learning and scholarship for its own sake (and our own good). This is how we grow and challenge ourselves. Nonetheless, AI can be a helpful tool, if used appropriately. I am not sure I have figured out the AI line yet to be honest, but it is something we will all have to reckon with moving forward in academia and the real world.

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