AI-powered summaries of web pages are a feature that you will find in many AI-centric tools these days. The next step for some of these tools is to prepare detailed and well-formatted web pages for your search queries. The Arc browser is doing this to some extent through its Arc Search app. Apple is rumored to soon release its own smart recap feature for web pages and articles. The latest addition to this trend is Perplexity AI.
With Perplexity Pages, the unicorn is aiming to help users make reports, articles or guides in a visually appealing format.
Free and paid users can find the option to create a page in the library section. They just need to enter a prompt, such as “Information about Sahara Desert,” for the tool to start creating a page. Users can select an audience type — beginner, advanced or anyone — to shape the tone of the generated text.
Perplexity said its algorithms work to create a detailed article with different sections. You can ask the AI tool to rewrite or reformat any sections or even remove them. Plus, you can add a section by prompting the tool to write about a certain subtopic. Perplexity also helps you find and insert relevant media items such as images and videos.
All these pages are publishable and also searchable through Google. You can share the link to these pages with other users. They can ask follow-up questions on the topic as well. What’s more, users can also turn their existing conversation threads into pages with the click of a button.
Perplexity’s head of design, Henry Modisett, said that the company wanted to utilize its core technology to use Perplexity as a research tool but in a more sharable format. Interestingly, Modisett spent more than eight years working for Quora as a product designer.
“We observed that our users were already sharing their search pages with others. So we wanted to make a more presentable format,” Modisett told TechCrunch over a call.
He also noted that while the AI engine starts answering the question and forming the page instantly, it takes the tool a couple of minutes to complete the page. That’s why it was challenging for him as a designer to think about animations that make the experience pleasant for users while they wait.
There have been multiple reports and continuous discussions about how AI-generated content will shape areas like blogging, journalism and the web at large. Perplexity sees this tool as information curation rather than content generation through AI.
“The way we frame the feature is that users curate [information], and they decide what the page is about and how it is organized. They are making all these decisions, so it’s not totally AI-generated, right?” Modisett said.
“Users are putting a lot of their taste into it. And I’d like to think that not all people can make a great page, so there is a very important human aspect to it about making decisions and how to make it interesting,” he added.
However, Perpleixty doesn’t know how this will play out with the rest of the web ecosystem yet. Modisett noted that just like the Perplexity search results, pages feature different sources and highlight them prominently.
The Perplexity Pages feature is rolling out to a limited number of users at the beginning, with the company planning to make it available to all users eventually. Users can only create pages on the web, but they are visible on both the web and the mobile apps.
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