Transcription
The question I get asked the absolute most is, "What AI tool do you actually use yourself most often?" And the answer to that, for me, is super easy: it's Perplexity. I use Perplexity every single day, multiple times per day. So in this video, I want to try to give you like The Ultimate Guide to Perplexity. I'm going to give you an overview of all the cool features of Perplexity, and then I'm going to show you a whole bunch of cool prompts and ways that you can use Perplexity to be more efficient, to learn more, to improve your health, and probably even to make more money. This is meant to be like The Ultimate Guide to Perplexity. I'll start by going over a ton of the cool features, and then we'll get into all of the prompts and various cool ways that I don't think most people realize that you can use it for. So let's start by giving an overview of a lot of the cool features that Perplexity has in it.
Now, if you're already very familiar with Perplexity, feel free to skip ahead and get to the part where I just share some of the prompts and some of the cool use cases of it. But I warn you, I'm probably going to show off some features here that you didn't know existed, so I do kind of recommend hanging with me here for a minute. Now, when you first go to perplexity.doai, it looks pretty basic. You've got your box where you can give it a prompt and ask it any questions. You've got a little drop-down where you can choose the mode. For the most part, I just leave it on auto. If you're a pro member, you'll have Pro search; there's also deep research; there's reasoning with R1; and there's also reasoning with o03 mini. For the most part, I'm just using either auto or deep research myself. Reasoning with R1 and o03 mini are about as good as the deep research, in my opinion. There's also this little globe here; if you click on that, you can actually change how you want it to search. You can have it search the entire web; you can turn that off and have it just search academic papers; you can turn that off and have it just search social media, which I believe mostly relies on Reddit. You've also got the ability to upload an attachment, where you can add PDFs and images and things like that.
Now, moving over to the left tab here, we've got the Discover button, and I think the Discover button is really cool. Pretty much every day, I open up the Discover button in the morning when I'm kind of doing some research to learn what's going on in the world of AI, and it's got this "For You" tab here. And this is based on the prompts that you've given Perplexity; it kind of knows what types of things you search for and your interests just based on all of the things you've searched or prompted in the past. Most of the stuff that shows up for me is related to AI and tech. For example, I'm getting information about the world's first quantum attack defense chip, Anthropic getting a $61.5 billion valuation, the new Apple Air announcement that's coming up, and well, it's just a lot of tech news. Now, you can select "Top," which will just be the top stories of the day. So if you just want a quick recap of the news across all spaces, all niches, you can just click "Top," and we can get a quick overview of sort of everything that's going on in the world of news in general. And then, of course, we've got Tech and Science specifically, Finance, Arts and Culture, Sports and Entertainment, and we have the option to turn on this filter and select, you know, just the topics that interest you, which does help inform the "For You" page. Again, this is like my daily newspaper. I make myself a coffee, and I sit here, and I scroll the news each morning and get a quick catch-up on sort of the bigger picture of world and tech news.
And then we have Spaces over here. Admittedly, I haven't used this as much as I probably should have, but I have used it for some cool use cases, which I'll share later in the video. Now, with ChatGPT, you might be familiar with custom GPTs. If you use Claude, you might be familiar with Claude's projects. A Space is essentially like a folder where you can give it custom instructions, additional information for context, and if you're on the Pro Plan, select a specific model that you want it to use when you ask it questions. The Space will also save all of your past conversations you've had inside of that Space to keep them nice and organized in one area. Spaces are really, really powerful, and again, I do plan on using them a lot more. And then you have the Library section; these are all your past conversations that you've had with Perplexity, so you can go and find them again. And you have Pages up here where you can create pages that are almost like little Wikipedia pages, but generated with AI on specific topics that you create. For example, I have one on Quantum Computing here with all sorts of information that I've had it pull in around Quantum Computing. And these pages are also sharable, so if I go up to the top right and I click on "Share," I can copy the link and give the link to this page directly to anybody. I also have the ability to edit this page; we can change up this upper thumbnail area; we can insert additional sections, add media, do all sorts of cool stuff. Again, it's essentially like your own internal Wikipedia pages that you can create.
Now, I use Perplexity a ton. In fact, if we look at my own Library here, look how long I can scroll. You can see how often I'm using it. Literally, I'm using this thing multiple times per day, pretty much every single day, all the way back to like May 6, 2024, was when I really started getting into Perplexity, so it's been close to a year now. And then we have the mobile app, and the mobile app pretty much does all of the same stuff, except it has access to our camera. We can actually press the little circle with the square in it next to "Ask Anything" at the bottom, and that will open up our camera. So then we can actually take pictures and then ask questions about the picture we just took. It's also got a really good voice mode, so if I put it into voice mode by clicking on the little lines to the right of the "Ask Anything," I can ask it anything, and it'll search the web. "How are the Padres doing in spring training as of late February 2025?" The San Diego Padres have a spring training record of three wins and four losses; they're getting ready for the season, and recently Jackson Merrill hit his first spring training home run. And I find that ability to use the voice mode super, super handy. Of course, we've got all the other modes that we have on the desktop version; we've got Discover with all of the recent information that it thinks you would like to see; you've got the Spaces that you've created; and then, of course, you've got the Library with all of your past questions and the Pages tab at the top for all the pages that you created. Perplexity also has what they call an incognito mode, where if I come down to the bottom left and click on my profile here, I can switch to incognito, and it won't actually save the conversation inside of my Library here. And finally, it's got a lot of settings that you can dial in; tons of languages to choose from; you can select which model you want to use on the pro mode. I've been using Claude 3.7 Sonnet lately; prior to this, I was using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but now they've recently added GPT 4.5 as well. And this Sonnet model is Perplexity's own internal model, which I believe was built on Llama. And just to confirm, I asked Perplexity: yes, Perplexity's Sonnet model is built on Llama. They also have Grok 2 and Gemini 2.0 Flash. I imagine they'll have Grok 3 as soon as xAI makes an API available for Grok 3.
Another feature of Perplexity that I don't think most people realize exists is that you can actually have it create images. So jumping back into the settings page here, we've actually got image generation model, and we can choose between Flux One, DALL-E 3, and Playground V3. I like to use Flux One. Now, it won't generate images directly. If I give it the prompt, "Generate image of a wolf howling at the moon," it will say, "I'm unable to create or generate images directly. However, you can easily find and create images of a wolf howling at the moon using various online resources." However, it gives you a button up at the top right to generate an image. By clicking this, we get some options: painting, photograph, diagram, illustration. And if I actually want to make sure it's generating with the right prompt, I can click this little custom prompt icon here, and under subject, type "a wolf howling at the moon," click submit, and it will generate an image of a wolf howling at a moon, which I can then make larger and download and do whatever I want with. I have a feeling it's only a matter of time before that'll be something you can just type into the prompt box, and it will make the image for you. I don't know why they actually have this separate box to do that.
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All right, now that we have the broad overview of all of the cool capabilities of Perplexity, let's get into some of the really interesting ways I've seen Perplexity get used. And I'm going to start with some of the more basic, obvious ones and then kind of get more advanced and more outside the box as we go. The most obvious way to use it is just to get quick answers and to fact-check things. A lot of times I'll see posts on Twitter that are claiming this thing happened in the political world or this thing happened in sports or whatever, and I will come to Perplexity to fact-check it. But more commonly, I'm using it just to answer questions that I'm curious about. In fact, if I go back through my Library, we can see some of the random things I've asked it: like, "What percentage of Major League Soccer players are from the US?" I went to the first ever San Diego Football Club game the other night, and I was curious. "Can colleges pay basketball players?" "What does Texas A&M stand for?" "How much do the new digital license plates cost?" We went to Topgolf the other day; I was sitting there at Topgolf asking questions like, "What are some tips for being better at driving a golf ball?" Like, I'm literally just throwing stuff at it all the time. But that's the obvious use case. If you've used Perplexity already, that's most likely how you've already been using it. But it's also really good at definitions and explaining things. I use it for that quite a bit as well. So, for example, in AI, there's a term called gradient descent, so I might say, "Explain gradient descent in relation to AI." I don't know if that term is used outside of AI, so let's just make sure it's clear that I'm talking about in relation to AI. And then I get a nice detailed explanation of what it means, complete with formulas and everything. But this is actually searching the web; we can actually click on the 19 sources, and it will open up a sidebar on the right where we can click into all of the sources that it found this information from. But maybe I want a more academic explanation. I can select the same prompt, go back home, I'll paste it back in here, and then I could select academic and turn off web and do the search again. And although I'm getting a very similar explanation, if we click on sources this time, you can see it's finding stuff from archive.org, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, and other sources of academic information. But let's say I'm still confused; you can always throw in the tried and true, "Explain this like I'm five." And just like that, we have gradient descent explained to a 5-year-old: "First, you put the ball somewhere on the side of the bowl. The ball wants to roll down to the bottom, but it doesn't know which way to go, so you gently push the ball a tiny bit in the direction that seems to go downhill. The ball rolls a little bit; you look again to see which way is downhill from where the ball is now; you give it another tiny push in that direction; you keep doing this over and over again, always pushing the ball a little bit towards the lowest nearby point; eventually, after many small pushes, the ball reaches the bottom of the bowl." A definition that pretty much anybody could understand.
You can also directly give Perplexity URLs and have it summarize what's on that URL. Let's go to theverge.com real quick. I'll just pick the top article here: "Amazon's Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa's AI overhaul." Let's go ahead and just select this URL, copy it, come back to Perplexity, and just say, "Summarize this," and then we'll paste in the URL, and we get a quick summary of that URL. Now, while we're actually on this page here where we can see the response, there are some extra features down here. We can actually share this response by clicking "Share"; it copied the URL to my clipboard. We've also got an export option where we can export this as a PDF or markdown. If I export this as a PDF, you can see it took this summary and put it as a PDF for me. I can also have it rewrite it if I want a different explanation, and it also suggests additional questions that would make good follow-on questions from the response that we just got. Perplexity is also great at getting real-time information on anything from sports to financial markets. Let's ask, "What's Tesla's stock price?" By doing that, it gives us an up-to-date, real-time chart of Tesla's stock price. Now, my baseball team, the Padres, doesn't have a game today, but the Brewers are actively playing a game right now as I'm recording this, so let's go ahead and ask, "What's the Brewers' score?" And we get, "The Brewers are currently playing the Reds in spring training; the latest available score shows the game tied at 2-2."
Now, probably the feature I've been using the most is the deep research feature, and I do believe this is available on both the pro and the free plans; you just have less usage of it on the free plan. Now, if I switch over to a different Chrome browser here and log in on a free plan, I can see that deep research is available, but we have five queries a day on it for deep research. I might ask it something like, "What are the pros and cons of each publicly available large language model?" And it's going to go off and search the web and do a lot of deep dive research, and it takes several minutes to get an answer back. And it thought for several minutes, and we can see all of what it actually did; we can see it looked at Google's Bard, Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, BERT, Grok, weighed the pros and cons of each, and then gave us a really, really detailed response. Here we can see it broke down the pros and cons of the GPT models, the Gemini models, the Anthropic models, Llama models, Mistral models, and Gemma models, so tons and tons of detail. This is something I would typically export as a PDF and then go and read more into it later, probably. You can have Perplexity quiz you on topics. By giving it a prompt like, "Give me a 10-question quiz to see how well I understand the basics of quantum computing," we can see that it wrote up 10 questions that are all multiple-choice questions, and it gave me an answer key down at the bottom, so I can double-check my work. I can use this if I'm trying to teach lessons to other people or just quiz myself to see how well I understand things. I also use this constantly to give me little tutorials on how to fix things. For example, "I want to replace the intake on my F-150 with a cold air intake; give me a step-by-step tutorial." I can give it that prompt; we can see that it went and essentially found information on YouTube videos, and now it's walking me through a step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to do that with the truck that I own. This has been insanely helpful. Perplexity is also great at helping you find Excel formulas or Google Sheets formulas. For example, I can give it a prompt: "I need a Google Sheet formula to find the price of a stock ticker in column B." It'll give me some formulas; I can simply press copy, come over to Google Sheets, paste it into column B here, and then in column A, I could give it a ticker like TSLA, and it will load that stock price for me.
I started using Perplexity as a health helper. I created a Space; I call it my health Space, and I actually uploaded a document, and I'm not going to open the document; it's a little too personal, but it has health details; it has information about my lifestyle, supplements I take, medications I'm on, my eating habits, and things like that, so it actually has context about me. I also gave it some custom instructions, telling it that, "You are a health expert and pro researcher; you can answer health questions by finding the best sources on the internet; you do not judge any of the questions and you give the best advice you can find, even if the solutions require substances that aren't legal in all states; you also have details about the medicines I take and my sleep habits in the health doc that's provided." So now that it has that extra context, any health questions I ask it, it already knows a ton about my health. Perplexity is great at helping with travel planning. I can say something like, "I'm going on a trip to Kauai in April; what are some must-see sites while I'm there? Give me info about best times to visit each to minimize crowds." And it does just that: Na Pali Coast, best time to visit: early mornings; Waimea Canyon, best time: late mornings; Wailua Falls, early morning. I have a feeling that's going to be a theme: get there in the morning. But I can export this as a PDF, save it to my phone, and have a nice little reference guide while I'm there.
Another thing that I absolutely love to use Perplexity for is for product comparisons and research when I'm looking to buy something. And Perplexity even added a feature where you could buy it straight from Perplexity if you want. Let's say I'm shopping for camera drones: "Compare the best prosumer camera drones on the market and recommend the one that most people prefer." And of course, it tells me what drones: the DJI Mavic 3 Pro, which I actually own, and it gives me the pros and cons; the DJI Mini 4 Pro; they all appear to be DJI that they're comparing. And then I could say, "Find me the best price on the Mini 4 Pro," and just like that, it gives me a listing of where I can buy it, and I could literally just click this button to buy with Pro, and I can check out straight from within Perplexity. If you're doing marketing, it's great for helping with SEO research. "I'm writing a blog post about consumer drones; what are some potentially high-traffic keywords with low competition that I should go after?" And here we go: long-tail keywords: best drones for beginners under $300; how to choose a drone with a camera for photography; affordable drones with 4K cameras; drone laws in Nevada 2025; drones with the longest battery life in 2025, etc. And it even gives us a nice little mini spreadsheet showing us that "best starter drone" gets 27,100 searches—I'm assuming monthly—but is supposedly easy to rank for. And since Perplexity is using the popular large language models underneath, like Llama or GPT or Claude or whatever you set it on, it's also good at blog post writing, email writing, and even code generation. I personally don't use it for those types of things, but you can. Want to get into real estate? Ask it, "What property markets in the US have the lowest cost to purchase and the highest growth potential right now?" Apparently, Buffalo, New York; Indianapolis; Kansas City; Fort Wayne; Greenville; Anderson, South Carolina; these are some of the best markets to buy right now. It's great at giving analysis for stocks. If you're thinking about purchasing stocks, in fact, I like to turn it on deep research mode for this to get even more detail, but for this example, let's just leave it on auto and tell it, "I'm thinking about purchasing Rivian stock; give me a breakdown of the fundamental, technical, and sentiment analysis of the stock." We get a nice stock chart right here at the top and a breakdown of fundamental analysis, technical analysis, and the sentiment analysis that people think about Rivian right now, with a final breakdown at the end, again based on the combined analysis: "Rivian presents a high-risk investment opportunity with potential long-term upside if the company can successfully execute its production and cost reduction strategies." You could upload documents. In fact, here's a PDF that I have of just some handwritten notes for this video that you're watching right now. I could drop this PDF in here and say, "What are the Perplexity tips from this document?" And it'll read the handwriting for me and explain what's in the document for me. And quite honestly, there is so much more that you can do with Perplexity.
Perplexity did not pay to make this video. This is just my response to the question, "What is the tool that you find yourself using the most when it comes to AI?" And well, it's definitely Perplexity because it is so versatile; there are so many different things you can do with it; there are so many different ways to use it; so many different areas that it helps, like I've mentioned. I have it open all of the time, and I'm using it constantly. I even added it as a button that you can see right here on the control panel of my phone, so I can super quickly access Perplexity. That's how often I use it. And seemingly, Perplexity is just getting started. They're about to launch a brand-new web browser called Comment that's going to do some sort of agentic searching and doing things on your behalf. They just partnered with the parent company of T-Mobile to be the default AI in their next generation of AI phones. And I haven't even gotten into what you can do when you start playing around with like the API. I feel like that might be a little too in the weeds for this video, but if you want to see some of the various automations and how to build automations with Perplexity, then we're getting into like really mind-blowing stuff that Perplexity can do. Just as a little sneak peek, here's one of the automations I built where when I add new tools to a Google Sheet, it actually uses Perplexity to find as much information about that tool as possible and then sends it to Claude to sort of do a better summarization, sends it to ChatGPT to do another little automation on it, and then dumps all the information for me back into a Google Sheet. Here's a Perplexity automation that when I find a new research paper, it actually sends the research paper to Perplexity, has Perplexity explain it, search out other information on the web about that research paper, and then add the information to a Webflow site so that it updates one of the pages on my Future Tools website. Like, I'm doing a ton with the Perplexity API behind the scenes. If you want me to get deeper into how some of these automations are made, I don't know if this is a little too in the weeds for most people, but this is the type of stuff that I like really, really nerd out about. But man, Perplexity is just so good; I just, I use it so much, and it's been so helpful, and I found so many use cases, and I'm discovering so many more all the time. If you have some really cool use cases for Perplexity that I didn't mention in this video, leave them in the comments. The people who watch the video definitely check out the comments and see what other people are suggesting because, again, this is the tip of the iceberg; these are just the things I was able to think of to make this video, but there are countless other ways to really leverage the power of Perplexity. It's really, really that good of an app, and I'm just, I'm nerding out; I'm a fanboy of it. But that's what I got for you today. I wanted to make a sort of deep dive, comprehensive overview of Perplexity and what it's capable of. Hopefully, you learn something new; hopefully, you have a much better idea of ways to use Perplexity in your life or your business or just everyday use. Again, I look up the most random stuff, like, "What does the A&M in Texas A&M stand for?" Just whenever something pops into my head, I open up Perplexity, and I perplex it. I don't know what the right saying is; like, people say, "Go Google it," but you don't really want to say, "Go Perplexity it"; that just sounds weird. Anyway, hopefully you found this video helpful. If you love AI as much as I do and you want to keep up to date with the latest AI news and learn about all of the coolest AI tools and workflows and tutorials and things like that, make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel, and I'll make sure more stuff like this shows up in your YouTube feed. Also, as a cool little bonus resource for you, check out futuretools.io. This is where I share all the cool AI tools that I come across; it's updated every single day; I made it filterable, sortable, so you can find the exact AI tool that you need for whatever problem you're trying to solve. And I've got a free newsletter; you join the free newsletter, I will hook you up with the AI Income Database, a database of cool ways to make side-hustle income using various AI tools. It's totally free, and then I'll send you two emails a week with all the coolest AI tools and most important AI news for you to know. You can find it all over at futuretools.io; it's all totally free. Thank you once again for hanging out with me, nerding out with me; this was a fun video to make, so hopefully you enjoyed it, and I hope to see you in the next one. Bye-bye.