I've been playing with artificial intelligence (AI) since Lisp was the state-of-the-art (that is to say, a while). Lately, like everyone else, I've been looking at AI a lot more closely. While it's nifty, I'm not that impressed — but not because OpenAI ripped off Scarlett Johansson or Google's AI Overviews recommend I use glue to help cheese stick to my pizza. It's that even when I tell the chatbot of the day to summarize an Otter.ai transcription of a meeting, it gets things wrong.
Also: How to avoid AI Overviews in Google Search: Three easy ways
That's why I treat the results of my AI queries very, very cautiously. That said, I've finally found an AI chatbot whose work I can easily double-check to make sure it's in the ballpark of being right: Perplexity.
That may not sound like much, but it's a critical feature. Because AI chatbots are trained on information scraped from the web, they are all capable of hallucinating or spouting errant nonsense. For instance, Google pulled the glue-in-pizza-sauce suggestion from a sarcastic Reddit post.
Perplexity also hallucinates, but it values data from trustworthy sources. Here's what it can do, and why it's become my favorite AI chatbot.
Overall, Perplexity AI is my pick over other chatbots because it's excellent at detailed research, but it can also translate from one language to another, write document summaries, and answer both simple and complex questions. Plus, you can use it to create poems, code, email messages, and articles.
It doesn't do everything, though. Unlike other chatbots, such as Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT with DALL-E 3, Perplexity does not include free AI image creation functionality. You can subscribe to Perplexity Pro — $20 per month or $200 per year — for basic AI-image creation tools, but they're not equal to the best AI image generators.
That said, if you need reliable, in-depth answers to your queries, it's my top choice. It may not get all the press that Google, Meta, Microsoft, or OpenAI have, but the results speak for themselves.