Android App Update for My Favorite AI App
Perplexity has been my most used AI app for many months now. I’ve talked about it in these two recent posts:
I use Perplexity on the desktop and on my phone, and more often on the phone in fact. The Perplexity Android app has always been good, but today it has been updated to add one feature that was previously only available on the desktop - Collections. I find this to be a simple but very useful feature, as it allows for organizing your threads (prompts, things you have asked it) into collections - as we do with notes into folders.
A little walk through of Perplexity’s simple UI here will show off some of its best features and what collections look like once you’ve got some history with the app. The image at the top of this post is the response to my prompt asking about how to disable Microsoft’s Copilot AI tool via Group Policy on a Windows machine. So that’s a thread.
The very useful feature to note in that image is the Sources section above the response. Generative AI apps are known to sometimes offer “hallucinations” - essentially spitting out inaccurate, made up responses - although there is recent reporting that suggests these are trending downwards. In any case, it will likely always be best practice to verify their responses. Being able to check the sources used in crafting the response is a big help in doing that.
Perplexity’s threads are saved in your Library if you have an account. You can delete individual threads, or all of your threads, at any time, and you have the option to opt-in or out of allowing your threads to be used in training Perplexity’s models.
As you can see, the library has sections for threads and collections. Here’s a look at my collections after I was able to some quick housekeeping - getting rid of a lot of one-off type threads that aren’t worth saving - and organizing on the Android app this morning:
Full disclosure here, I also spent a little time finding icons I like for the collections.
Here are a couple more simple but very likable/useful features of Perplexity - Discover and Suggestions, both of which are available on desktop and the Android app. Discover shows current news items that look relevant to your threads history:
Suggestions show up at the top of Collections pages, and they’re generally quite good, relevant to the collection’s topic:
As you know if you’ve been following Tech & Nonsense for even a little while, I’m trying out and regularly using several AI apps. I currently have five on my phone and the same five plus a sixth one on my Mac that allows me to run large language models locally. Perplexity is still the one I go to first and most often.