Transcription
I'll be honest. I didn't get the hype about AI browsers, but after using Perplexity Comet for a full week, I am all in. And I'm about to show you 10 real-world use cases that make Comet an invaluable part of my workflow.
And I've tried multiple browsers. I tried Dia, Google Chrome with Gemini, and even ChatGPT Agent Mode. None of those are as capable as Perplexity Comet on taking action on websites. And I'm going to show you specific examples of finding promo codes for websites, incredible use cases for YouTube and finding clips, quickly finding files on websites that may be difficult to navigate, analyze data and metrics quickly, and how it's completely changed how I use my Mac.
Now, for those of you already writing a comment about security and privacy, I'll address that at the end of the video. But first, let me blow your mind with some use cases.
Use case one, finding promo codes for websites. Yes, no more looking at those shady websites where you have to click or put in your email. I'm actually going to do a side-by-side comparison because you can ask ChatGPT to find promo codes as well, and I have it in agent mode right now. The problem is it can't actually test those promo codes live in your cart. So for this website, which is notoriously hard to find promo codes for, here I am at the website in the cart and the perplexity browser can actually see the discount code form field and I just prompted to find a promo code that's going to work, but keep trying them until it actually goes through. As you can see, a lot of times promo codes, even that the AI finds might not work. But the difference is Comet can actually try them here in the cart until it's accepted. That quickly it already found a discount code that actually worked. He was able to put it in, click apply, and now it's going to look to see if there's any better deals. But ChatGPT in agent mode, which actually had started on this task minutes ago, is still looking.
I'm actually going to pull up a second website. This is Overstock and give it the same prompt to find a discount code. And that's another powerful feature of an AI browser. I can leave it running a task in one tab, open a new tab, and start again. And some of the use cases I'm going to show you, you might say, well, I can do that faster. But yeah, you have to focus on that task and do nothing faster. Perplexity Comet can just do it in the background while you start doing something else. And you can see it already found a promo code here for Overstock. It was able to try it out and you could prompt it to look for even more or better discounts if you wanted to. ChatGPT agent is still working in the background.
Number two, Perplexity Comet can do incredible things when it comes to YouTube. For instance, I can prompt it to play the exact time code where Neil Armstrong says "one small step for man" and play that clip on YouTube. So when I give Perplexity Comet that prompt, it's actually going to find you the YouTube video where he says that and then start playing at the exact time code. And see it open the tab. There it's playing. That quickly it was able to find the exact moment I was looking for. And it doesn't even have to be that specific. I'm going to ask it to find a part of a Steve Jobs keynote where he talked about Apple being at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. When I give it that prompt, it's going to go look through many different keynotes, find a clip, and boom, that quickly. Now I have the moment where Steve Jobs talks about that. And if I wanted to pull this as a clip, maybe use it in a documentary-style video, it's that easy to find.
Not only that, but it can take action on videos that you're watching live on YouTube. So I'm watching this Sara Dietschy video about her setup and maybe I want to ask a question and just find out what camera is she using. It'll go through the captions or the transcript of the video, provides it. And there you have it. It told me that Sara is using the FX3. I can ask it about different pieces of equipment or I can even ask it for timestamps, like tell me where in this video she talks about the audio setup and microphones. That quickly gives me a timestamp at 12:46 and I can jump to it. You can also ask it general questions, which you can do this with the Dia browser as well. But you can ask it for actionable tips on making YouTube video intros from an interview that you might be watching, like this Colin and Samir video. And I get those points right here side-by-side as I'm watching. Then I can ask for timestamps and then I can jump to the part of that conversation where they discuss the tip.
And let's say you were watching my recent iOS 16 video with 100 plus features. I'll link that video above, by the way. If you wanted to, say, get the thumbnail for the video, I can just ask the browser that raw thumbnail image from the page code. And I can save that image to the computer. You can even ask it to find videos and add them to a playlist. So I'll give it that prompt and it will literally search YouTube for me, find videos and automatically add them to my playlist. Now this use case specifically is a little hit and miss. It's not super accurate, but it can search for the keynotes in the YouTube search bar. It will find what looks like the full-length keynote and then try to add it to my playlist. And you can see it's doing it. It does take a while, but again, you can leave this running in the tab and do something else.
All right, number three. And yes, we're only on number three. A lot of times I have products that I want to make into a list and it can be difficult to get the Amazon links and get a nice title because even Shortcuts, which I love and use all the time, if it pulls the raw title from an item listing, it's going to be a long, messy title. But if I have a bunch of Amazon tabs open here in my browser, I'll prompt Comet by saying, "Take all the Amazon tabs in this window, get a short URL, format the product title, and then put it in this format: product name, link, and so on and so forth." And do something else. But side note, an incredible utility now that I'm using more AI browsers and prompts, TextExpander is invaluable. I have a whole list here of prompts now that I'm using with both Comet and ChatGPT, and it's nice to just be able to do a little string of text and then the prompt fully expands and I'm good to go. If you've never used TextExpander or just the keyboard shortcuts built into Mac, highly recommend trying it with prompts.
By the way, ChatGPT finally gave me some promo codes for this website, and most of them failed. It did find one that worked for 10% off, but as you saw, Comet did it in seconds and ChatGPT took 11 minutes. And here's a full list of all those Amazon products. Comet actually shortened the name so you just have the brand and what it is, plus shorter Amazon URLs. That would save me a long time right there.
Number four, this is a niche use case, but Perplexity is the only thing that can do it. When I upload subscriber audio to Apple Podcasts, meaning you pay for the bonus episodes and ad-free versions of Primary Technology, which by the way, is my tech podcast with Jason Aten. You should totally subscribe. New episodes every week. I'll link it above and down in the description. But Apple Podcasts, when I upload that subscriber audio, I have to wait for it to process in order to click the publish button. It is maddening. Apple should really just let you say "publish when audio is processed" so I don't have to sit here and babysit it. But I don't have to anymore because Perplexity Comet will babysit it for me. So I have a prompt where I tell it, "Refresh this browser every minute. And once that publish button turns purple, publish the episode." There's been some times where I forgot to publish the episode just because I'm having to sit here and refresh the browser. But now Perplexity can do it for me and then it clicks publish when it's ready. That was actually the first use case I discovered and I use that every day because we do a Primary Tech daily episode also.
Number five, Perplexity is great at finding PDF or other file URLs that might be on a website so you don't have to go looking and searching. Yes, you could do a site search in Google. But if I was here on the IRS page, I can just ask it something like, "Get me the W9 PDF from this website." And I'm just on the homepage. I'm not on anything special. And in just a few seconds, it's going to find that form and I can just download it. Boom. There's the link right here, I can click it. There's the PDF.
This is also really useful for obtuse government websites like a DMV website. So I can ask it, "What documentation do I need for a new tag or registration on my car?" And so it'll just automatically tell me right here, based on this webpage and other sources it's found. But because it can just load pages for me, I'm going to ask it, "Bring me to the page on this website with that information." And then Comet can just bring me to the page on the DMV website that has all the info I need. You can see it literally navigating the website, clicking around, finding the page I need to be so I can browse and actually read the info in context.
Number six, whether it's website analytics and metrics or maybe podcast downloads, Comet can just analyze the information from a website and then you can just ask a question. So here I am on Transistor and I can ask it, "What's our second highest downloaded episode of this podcast?" And it will look at the information, browse whatever part of the site it needs. And it just tells me the episode right here. I can also ask it, "What month in the last year had the most downloads?" And if you use things like Google Search Console or Google Analytics on a website, sometimes it could be hard to get the exact information you want, but you could just ask Comet to do it. And it even had to download a CSV file, but it was able to do it, change the date range. And now I have my answer.
Now, speaking of metrics, we can go back to YouTube and Comet's actually great at analyzing YouTube metrics here in advanced mode. As you can see, it's actually changing the date range here in advanced mode to get the last six months. And just like that, it found which month had the highest watch hours and told me how many. Then it can even format data that you're asking about into a table with all the data from my YouTube Studio.
Let's actually copy this. And for number eight, I'm going to show you what it can do with a Google Sheet. So I just copy and pasted that markdown table that I had from Comet. And now I can ask it for formulas based on the data in this sheet. For instance, I can ask it, "What's the average watch time from this data?" And it knows what this data is because it's looking at the website and boom, it can give me the average. But I can even ask it to help me with formulas to insert into the spreadsheet. I'll just ask it for a simple formula that calculates the sum total from a specific column. The formula I need to do. So I can just copy paste that here in the spreadsheet and I'm done. And this can help you build even more advanced formulas in spreadsheets. I can't take as much action on spreadsheets that I would like. I'm sure that's coming in future updates, but just being able to give me formulas or just give me answers about the data I'm looking at, that's pretty great.
Number nine, searching for specific content on a website is just better in Comet. So this is our podcast website for Primary Technology. And I know there's transcripts for every episode and maybe I could do a site colon and search through Google, but I can just ask Comet, "What are some of the episodes listed on this site where we talk about the Mac Studio?" And it's going to look through all the pages of the website and find it like Google would. That quickly it already told me which episodes it is. But then I can tell Perplexity to just navigate to the page of the episode that it was describing. And there we go. We already got brought to it. And it even went to the transcript. And because it's going to be a long website, I can ask it, "Finding the transcript where we start talking about the Mac Studio." And now we jump to that specific part of the transcript. And that's because it can control the website here browser, which is different than just having a chatbot off to the side.
Number 10, if you use LinkedIn or if you're trying to find contacts on the platform, I actually saw Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal tweet about this, where she used Perplexity Comet to great effect to find people. So I'm going to ask Comet to find someone who used to work on the AI team at Apple, but now works at Meta and then navigate to their profile here in the browser. And there's the profile here on LinkedIn. And yeah, sure enough, he's worked at Google, Apple, and now Meta.
So those were 10 useful use cases, at least for me. But let me give you two bonus ones just for fun. If you were searching a site like Zillow, maybe for a house, you can use the built-in search and then try to filter those search results manually. But you can also just type what you're looking for in Comet and then it will do all the filtering for you. Now again, is this faster than you actually doing it? No, but I can go do something else while it's doing this in the background. For instance, let's see if it can play Wordle. Now, last time I've tried to have it do the Wordle, it actually didn't do so well. So I'm going to let it read the instructions and then start trying to solve it and we'll see if I can beat it.
All right, it's starting to play. Let's do this. Okay. All right. Let's try. All right. It doesn't start with the R. Not doing too well here. I'm doing it faster than Comet. Not sure if I'm doing it better. Let's try that. Whoa. All right. Way better than I thought. So we know the R is second. So let's do that. I bet you it's that. They love doing those double letters. Boom. Got it in four. All right.
And while it plays Wordle, let me check back on our Zillow listings. And yeah, it's found a bunch of houses in Lakeland, Florida, under $400,000 dollars with at least four beds, three baths. And again, I could have done those filters quicker myself, but I didn't have to wait around and click all those things myself. I could just let Comet do it for me. Would I let Comet play Wordle for me? No, I don't think so.
All right, while we wait to see if we can actually solve the Wordle, let me mention, yes, there are some concerns when it comes to privacy and security with Perplexity. The Perplexity CEO has said they're going to track everything users do in their browser to sell hyper-personalized ads. That doesn't feel great. And I'll be honest, I'm not going to do my online banking through Perplexity Comet right now. But as of right value, it provides being able to do the things it does and save me time across many tasks, it's worth it for me to just do those specific things, even if it's just clicking publish on Apple Podcasts and maybe finding me a couple YouTube videos. I would love to see other browsers like Dia or maybe tighter integration with Google Gemini and Chrome, although not crazy about using Chrome either. But one thing I would really love is for Apple to maybe build more intelligence into Safari. But I think we're really far away from that. And while I still use Safari by default and I have all the Safari profiles and tabs, I'm using Comet more and more, especially knowing it can do all this for me.
Comet is really struggling with this Wordle. So while we wait to see if it solves Wordle, subscribe to my channel right here below. Hit the like button. If you have any questions, leave comments below this video or use cases that you have found for Perplexity Comet or other AI browsers that are just blowing your mind. I'd love to hear about them down below. Also, if you're on any of the betas or just want to see 100 plus new features coming to iOS 16, I'll put my video on that right up here. And if you liked hearing about AI browsers and the things it could automate, I do a lot of automation videos, especially about Shortcuts on iPhone, which I still love and use all the time. So you can see my recent Shortcuts video right up here. And I have a playlist with like 50 plus videos all about Shortcuts. Plus, you can join my Shortcuts community at create.beard.fm. You can join for free, talk with other Shortcuts lovers, people who are making them and sharing. But if you support that community at five dollars a month, you get access to my Shortcut of the Week that I don't share in any videos, my Shortcuts database, which is searchable, and you get my my Shortcuts GPT, which I'm training for API usage and actions like match text, and it supports the channel. So I'd appreciate your support. Create.beard.fm. I'll see you over there.
And, man, Comet is really struggling. I'll let you know if it ever gets it.