AI-powered web summaries are a feature you’ll find in many AI-focused tools these days. The next step for some of these tools is to prepare detailed and well-formed web pages for your search queries. Arc Browser does this to some extent through its Arc Search application. Apple is rumored to be rolling out its own smart recap feature for web pages and articles. The latest addition to this trend is Perplexity AI.
With Perplexity Pages, the unicorn aims to help users make reports, articles or guides in a visually appealing format.
Free and paid users can find the page creation option in the library section. They just need to enter a prompt such as “Sahara Desert Information” to start the tool building a page. Users can select an audience type—beginner, advanced, or anyone—to shape the tone of the text generated.
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. Additionally, you can add a section by asking the tool to write about a specific subtopic. Perpelixity also helps you find and import relevant media assets such as images and videos.
All these pages can be published and also searched through Google. You can share the link to these pages with other users. They can also ask follow-up questions about the topic. Additionally, users can also turn their existing chat threads into pages with a click of a button.
Perplexity’s head of design, Henry Modisett, said the company wanted to use its core technology to use Perplexity as a research tool, but in a more common form. Interestingly, Modisett spent more than eight years works for Quora as a product designer.
“We noticed that our users were already sharing their search pages with others. So we wanted to create a more presentable format,” Modisett told TechCrunch after a call.
He also noted that while the AI engine starts answering the question and forming the page immediately, it takes the tool a few minutes to complete the page. So it was a challenge for him as a designer to think of animations that make the experience enjoyable for users while they wait.
They have been multiple References and continuous discussions about how AI-generated content will shape fields like blogging, journalism and the web in general. Perpelixty sees this tool as information curation rather than AI content production.
“The way we frame the feature is that users curate [information], and decide what the page is about and how it is organized. They’re making all those decisions, so it’s not completely AI-generated, right?’ said Modisette.
“Users really like it. And I’d like to think that not all people can make a great page, so there’s a very important human aspect to it about decision-making and how to make it interesting,” he added.
However, Perpleixty doesn’t yet know how this will play out with the rest of the web ecosystem. Modisett noted that just like Perplexity’s search results, the pages feature different sources and label them prominently.
The Perplexity Pages feature is rolling out to a limited number of users at first, with the company planning to make it available to all users eventually. Users can create pages only on the web, but they are visible on both the web and mobile apps.
