Your Browser, Supercharged: Meet Perplexity's AI Comet
Imagine a web browser that doesn't just show you information, but acts on it. While Google is still working on its vision for an AI-powered browser, a company called Perplexity has just launched its own contender: Comet. And it's designed to do a lot more than just search.
Comet is an AI-infused browser that aims to simplify how you use the internet. Instead of the usual Google search results, when you type a question into Comet, it uses Perplexity's own AI to give you a summarized answer, along with links to where it found the information. This can be super handy when you want quick, distilled facts rather than a long list of websites.
But the real magic of Comet lies in its built-in AI assistant. Similar to what Google is testing with Gemini in Chrome, Comet's assistant can summarize articles you're reading, describe images, or even give you a quick rundown of a YouTube video. It can also scan all your open tabs to provide summaries or compare products across different pages.
What truly makes Comet stand out, however, is its ability to complete tasks for you. Yes, you read that right! After linking your Google account, I saw Comet quickly draft and send an email summarizing the hurricane season outlook. It closed all my old tabs, and even posted an update on my X (formerly Twitter) account about an upcoming tech event.
One of the most impressive demonstrations was watching Comet unsubscribe me from promotional emails. It literally showed me, step-by-step, how it found the emails, located the unsubscribe button, and clicked it. It even accepted LinkedIn invitations for me, based on specific rules I set!
For more complex actions, you simply tell Comet to "take control of my browser." I saw it open a collapsed comments section on a webpage (something other AI tools couldn't do) just to summarize the user sentiment. And in a truly mind-blowing moment, I watched it add items to my Amazon cart and complete the checkout process all by itself, selecting shipping and payment options without any intervention from me.
Now, it's not entirely perfect. For very simple tasks like unsubscribing from emails, I found it faster to do it myself. And in one instance, when booking a restaurant, it initially forgot my contact details, using placeholders instead. Perplexity admits that more complicated actions can have a higher failure rate right now, but they expect AI models to improve rapidly.
Despite these minor bumps, Comet is a significant leap forward compared to what Google currently offers in its Chrome browser. Perplexity's CEO has openly stated their ambition to challenge Google's long-held top spot, and Comet could be the key. It offers a fascinating glimpse into a future where your browser isn't just a window to the internet, but a proactive, intelligent assistant that handles your digital chores. Could this be the beginning of a new era for how we interact with the web?
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