Transcription
Perplexity has been releasing some insanely helpful updates, and today I am really excited to share with you exactly how you can put these into your workflow immediately. In the next few minutes, you're going to learn how to use Perplexity's super powerful AI search on your own files, including using it to switch between the heavy hitters like Claude and GPT-4. But then I want to get into how you can deeply control it and automate many different processes with its new instructions feature. I'm even going to show you how to turn your work into a public blog post, complete with custom graphics, with just one click. There's also a killer Chrome extension, but the part I'm probably most excited about is the new API features that they just released. This is truly a game changer that can open many doors to your AI automations. Perplexity could be the only AI tool that you need these days, and today I'm excited to show you exactly why.
If you're new to Perplexity, you can just go over to perplexity.ai and log in. Up until releasing these new features, it's been primarily useful to me as a search engine. So while many folks are using it for that, hardly anybody is getting the full potential out of Perplexity, and that's what I want to get into today, starting with this spaces feature right here. So when we create a new space, these are very similar to custom GPTs and ChatGPT or Claude projects, but it has this extra ability of being able to search the internet in a very, very powerful way. I know that ChatGPT can do that, but I think it pales in comparison to the way that Perplexity can do that. In fact, Perplexity's biggest advantage over some of the other AI models is its ability to go out and search different pieces of information. This is called RAG—Retrieval Augmented Generation—which you might hear around, and it is really powerful. Now to be able to use that on your own files, which I'm going to show you here in a second, I'm going to create a space here all about cooking.
I love to eat, and I recently moved to a rural area that is not near any real good restaurant, so it's all up to me. Here, I'm going to put in here "cooking," just putting in a little description here, and then this is where you can pick a different AI model that is only available in the paid version. Custom instructions go right in here. So here I'm going to start with some simple instructions. This is a very simple set of instructions I'm adding in here; we're going to get to a really advanced version in just a second, but here I'm just saying, "The goal is to improve my cooking techniques." That focuses this tool really just around that task. Okay, now we're in here, and I want to upload some of these files. So you can upload five files on the free plan; it loves PDFs apparently. So here are some notes on three different cooking books that I have come to love. These are not as large as the full books. If you're coming from Notebook LM, you're used to uploading full books; unfortunately, that won't work inside of Perplexity as those files tend to be too large, mainly I think because of all the images and photos. I think if you found a PDF that didn't have images and photos, uh, it it may fit under the 25-megabyte, uh, you know, criteria there. But you can always, always use Notebook LM to create notes that you then upload here. So I've uploaded those PDFs, so I'm going to just ask, you know, "What is the overlap between these books?" And what's really cool here is you can focus it on different areas here. So if you wanted to just search the web, you may want to go out and gather information that you can add to these files; you can do that way, or you can do it on your files that are specifically here, your space files. These are the files that you upload. You can select both or one or the other. You'll need to click on this Pro feature, uh, which you only have a certain amount of pro searches per day in the free plan. That may be fine if you're just using this to get started, but if you're going to become a power user, you're definitely going to want to upgrade to the paid plan. And this is now using its powerful AI search abilities on your files. So you can think of loading any sort of documentation and being able to use Perplexity to go through that information, and it adds the citations here to the different files.
You may be asking yourself, if you use Notebook LM, why can't I just use Notebook LM for this? And the truth is, there's a lot of different overlap between these large language models, but there's something very powerful about Perplexity being able to search the web and do all of these different things, especially accessing these other large language models in here. It's sort of a Swiss army knife of all of the best AI tools out there. All right, so that was a very basic use case for spaces. Now I want to give you an advanced use case. This is a PPC creator; it's going to walk through 16 different steps to create an entire PPC campaign. I'm jumping into the cheat sheet here. I make a cheat sheet for every single video that I create; there's over a hundred in there now. These are all instantly accessible to anybody who joins my Patreon, and this one has these extensive instructions for this PPC campaign creator. I've got a few other example instructions in here as well. I'm just going to copy and paste this; you can see all the different steps here that it walks through when creating your PPC campaign, everything from generating ideas through creating the ads through creating landing pages and even a video script there. Then I'm going to copy and paste these instructions in directly from the cheat sheet right in here, updating it, and then the first thing we need to do to kick off this process to automatically create this PPC campaign is to simply upload some copy. I'm just going to grab the copy from my website; I'm doing a Ctrl+C, and I'm going to drop that right in here, and we're going to let it rip. So it has basically regurgitated that information back to me, and I'm going to just say, "Please proceed to the next step." Here it starts to map out all the different ad campaign ideas. I just said number four is the best; please proceed. It starts to create the ad copy, and then all you need to do is just say, "Please proceed," or select a choice, and it works through all these different 16 steps of creating an entire PPC campaign. Again, I've got those instructions in the cheat sheet; I've also got some instructions for a LinkedIn campaign if you're interested. In how I come up with these instructions, I'm going to link to a video that explains exactly how I do that now, so go ahead and check that out when you get a chance.
Now I'm jumping into a paid account so I can show you all the different AI models you have access to inside of here. They just added Grok in the last 24 hours when I was prepping for this video; that wasn't even in there. So you can tell they're going to be upgrading this very consistently. You've got GPT-4, which is basically the, you know, standard baseline best AI model there. You you got Claude Sonnet, which is a killer model, and these all have different abilities to do things better than others. In addition to that, you've got access to these Sonar models, which are the default Perplexity models, which I believe is how they can do such a great job of combing through the internet at large and finding great resources there. I know there's a lot of folks out there who are working on these different knowledge bases, and one pro tip you might want to think about is chunking them down to a reasonable size. I think it'd be much easier for the AI model to go through 10 different documents that are maybe 10 pages each versus one 100-page document. So think about organizing them in that structure, and then also you may want to add a table of contents inside of these instructions, letting Perplexity know, "Hey, here are the documents you have access to; here's a brief breakdown of what's inside those documents." If you want to go even one step farther, you can put a table of contents inside each one of those documents, pointing the large language model to all the different sections, and in this way, you're really helping the large language model find the most pertinent information at whenever you're requesting it.
All right, so I've gone back and forth with this large language model about cooking quite a bit here and asked it to dive into some details about different cookbooks and different resources out there, and now I want to create a web page that I can share with the world. So you can do that in one click right up here with this "Convert to page" feature. So let's click this; it's going to go through, and it's going to create this awesome web page. Let me show you all the things we can do with this. You can see it's even building a navigation structure here. All right, so we've got all these different sections, but let's say we want to get a little more detail on this particular section. We can go right in here, click this "Edit" on this section, click it over to "Detailed," and regenerate just that section, giving more details there. Awesome. Now let's say we want to add some images here, add some media. It's finding some images here; that's not great. Let's change it out. Now we've got an image there. You can do all sorts of stuff to adjust the layout; you can add sections down here, and you can see these different layout options as well. At the top, we can even generate our own image. So let's go in here to "Generate image," and we can select from these different options. I'm going to select "Painting," and you can see it has generated a perfectly terrible painting here, trying to make cookbooks. Can't do texts, you know. So let's see what we can do here. We're going to change this out; we're going to generate another image, and now we're going to give it our own prompt. I like to give it a very simple prompt that has been my hack for image creation with AI. I'm going to put the style in here as a "high-res photograph with cinematic lighting," and the subject here is "cooking insanity." See what we get, and there we go, much better. You can adjust where it lives and reposition it, but I got to say Midjourney is my go-to for images. So I had a little bit of fun with this; I want to show you what I did in Midjourney. I used that same prompt, and it came up with this. That's a little bit more of the cooking insanity I'm looking for, but it wasn't quite wide enough; I didn't want to crop it. So you can use these panning features down here to widen it, which is exactly what I did. So this is my final version here; I feel like this represents me in the kitchen more than any of the other images. You can then share this very easily; the link is copied here, and then anybody can view that link. It looks just like this when you share it; you can see it's got all this information as well as a really cool little table of contents. If you're doing something long, uh, it links to all the different sources here as well.
I found that these pages can be incredibly useful. I recently had a family member who was struggling with some health issues. I heard about a treatment for that, and I knew that, you know, she's a little bit older; she wasn't going to Google all that stuff or put that research together. I went in and, with a few prompts, created a page that had everything I wanted to illustrate to her right there in that page and shared that information with her so she didn't have to do all that research. Another thing is when I get questions over and over, the same questions in my YouTube comments, I've just created pages that go in deep detail to answer those questions, and now I just pop that link in and can use it like an FAQ very easily and quickly that way.
Next, this video wouldn't be complete if I didn't talk a little bit about this Focus feature. This feature is so important; I created a whole other video about it. I'm going to link to that now, but real quickly, when you're using Perplexity, basically most people are using it to go out and search the web, which it's awesome for, but there are times when you only want to search different parts of the web. You don't want to know what the internet in general is saying; you want to focus it in on specific areas depending on what you are researching, and that's where this Focus feature becomes super helpful because it's set by default to search the entire web, which is probably what you're used to. But let's say you're considering taking some supplements for that; you might want to look into the academic Focus that just pulls specific research about that supplement if it's good or bad. You don't want to know what every fitness guru or, you know, wannabe influencer is saying about that supplement; you want to know what the science says, what the data says. That's where this academic Focus can be very helpful. If you're doing any sort of industry research into your specific industry, that's where you can find really that source, high-quality information. But this social Focus feature is probably even more important than that. I use this feature nearly every day, and what this social Focus feature does is it goes out and searches Reddit specifically for information. Now Reddit is a lot of different things, but one thing it is very good at is for honest feedback about purchases, and while all the other different review sites seem to be overrun with spam and scams, I find I get some pretty good input when I use this social Focus feature. I use this for everything from when I'm trying a new restaurant or when I am buying something big or trying some new software. I want to get a feel for what people on Reddit are saying when I use this feature, and I get the response; there are mixed reviews; I think maybe I need to find something else. And when a search is returned saying there are positive reviews, that means almost everybody on Reddit is excited about that particular restaurant or software tool or whatever it is. That's a very good signal that you're going to be happy with whatever that purchase decision might be. Again, I've got a whole other video about this; I'm going to link to that in the description as well.
All right, next I want to show you the Perplexity Chrome extension. This thing is awesome. So everything we've done up till now has been inside of Perplexity, but let's say we're just browsing the web, and we want to access Perplexity without, you know, changing tabs and copying and pasting. That's where this Perplexity Chrome extension is awesome. Check this out. I'm here on a Wikipedia page, and I'm clicking in here, and we can focus this on: Do we want Perplexity to search the entire internet? So maybe you're reading something here, and you have a question that you want to go out and do extra research for. Do we want to just focus it on this domain, maybe Wikipedia, or this page in particular? So I'm going to select this page; I'm going to say, "What are some practical ways I can put this to use?" And it is going through this page in particular, and it is giving me basically exercises that I can go through to put this to use. Super cool. You can copy and paste that with a little clipboard right here; you can grab a link to this thread here; here's what that looks like; you can convert that into a page, or you can share just that thread as is. You can also summarize what you're looking at here, but I have stopped using AI for summaries because I feel like it glosses over the stuff that I really need to know and just gives me some boring, bland piece of information that makes me feel like I've learned something when I actually haven't. A pro tip that I like to use is asking it instead; say, "What are some of the nuances here that might help me understand this in a deeper way?" So having it pull up the nuances, it's almost the reverse of a summary, can really help you get the meat and potatoes out of whatever you're looking at.
Now I want to get to the feature that I'm most excited about: This is using Perplexity's search abilities in the API format. This really puts any of our more sophisticated automations on steroids. I've done some videos on Make.com; I'm going to link to one of those in the description. This is the tool that I like to use the most for these automations that connect different tools. Let me show you really quick how I'm using Perplexity to do this inside of Make. We've got all these different scenarios; these are my different automations; this is the most basic one here that I want to show you. This little module here is basically just the prompt; this variable is set to "Did the Celtics win last night?" And then it's connected to Perplexity, which goes out and searches if the Celtics won last night. Let's run this; see what we get. There we go. Click right in here, and by opening all this up, we can see the different places that it searched and that this was a trick question because the Celtics did not play last night. Gives us a little bit of more information about what happened there, but this opens up so many different use cases because all of the automations up to this point have really relied on the training data that is in the AI models, and if you wanted to get up-to-date, real-time information in there, you would have to copy and paste that in manually. So here's how we're going to take this to the next level. I've got another prompt here that basically says, "Were there any advancements in AI last week?" This hits Perplexity and dumps this out into a Google Doc. I have this set to run on Mondays so I can just stay ahead of whatever any of these large labs have done over the week. Let me show you how this one works. It's running that inside of Perplexity now; it's creating that Google Doc, and bam, there you go. That is the Google Doc right there that showcases everything that happened last week that gets generated every Monday, so I'm not missing anything. Another great use for this is social media. So I've got this to do my social media research; the prompt here is looking for trending topics for software developers on social media. Again, that hits Perplexity and creates a Google Doc. Here's what that Google Doc looks like. I'm going to make these two scenarios available to my Patreon supporters as well. These are super easy to implement; all you got to do is download these files; they're called blueprint files, and then you upload them like this. I'll show you. So once you log into Make, there's a ton you can do inside of Make for free. You just create a new scenario; you go right down here to "More," and then you import a blueprint. Here's that AI research blueprint that's going to be available to all my Patreons. Just click that, click "Open," click "Save," boom. Now you have that all for yourself there. You can update this prompt however you want; you can attach it to Notion or any of your other different tools. There's a ton you can do with this. I do have other videos all about Make.com; I'm going to put a link to one of those in the description that also includes a bunch of other scenarios for my Patreon supporters as well. But think about it; that is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with this Perplexity API functionality. You can now start all of your automations with, "Hey, go out and find the latest and greatest of XYZ," and then you can put it through all these different steps, crafting social media exactly to be in your tone and voice, connecting it to other different AIs and other different tools in your tech stack. There is a ton you can do with this. Again, those blueprints will be available to my Patreon supporters, along with the cheat sheet to this video. Anybody who joins my Patreon gets access to not only that but over a hundred other cheat sheets just like it. The Patreon supporters are really what make this channel happen. Again, I hope you dive into these features; I hope you put them to use, and I hope you check out that Focus feature. Like I said, I've got an entire video dedicated all to that Focus feature; there is a link to that right here. Check that video out; there is so much you can do with that; that's the next step in your AI mastery. I will see you on that video.