Perplexity's AI shopping tool is free for all now, just in time for Black Friday – how to use it

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Perplexity is refreshing its AI shopping agent for the holidays.
• It’ll be free for US-based users on web and desktop.
• It’s part of Perplexity’s vision of a more personalized internet.

We’re just a little more than one week away from Black Friday, the unofficial start of the annual nationwide holiday shopping spree. AI startup Perplexity is gearing up by reintroducing its AI-powered shopping agent.

Also: I let Google’s new AI tools take on my holiday shopping list – here’s how it went

Originally launched almost one year ago for Pro and Max subscribers, Perplexity’s shopping agent is intended to serve as a kind of virtual assistant that saves users time by surfacing personalized product recommendations and minimizing the steps between discovery and checkout. The assistant’s “Buy With Pro” feature, which lets users buy items with one click, used to be reserved for Pro users — a $20 per month subscription — but is now available for everyone for free. 

How it works 

Users can start by querying either Perplexity’s desktop app or website. Perplexity will then “detect if your question has shopping intent, and integrate product recommendations directly into that answer,” the company explained in the release. 

Like all of Perplexity’s products, the shopping assistant is built atop a large language model, allowing it to interact with users via natural language text. Its agent…