This Is How to Turn Perplexity Into Your Personal Research Assistant for Any Subject

Many people use ChatGPT as a secondary search engine, but there are times when you’ll want to go deeper than a quick Q&A prompt. You might be looking to learn a new skill, tackle something for work, help with your child’s homework or simply explore your curiosities.

Now you can do it all on one AI platform, instead of jumping between Google, ChatGPT, YouTube, podcasts, books, journals, encyclopedias and more.

Manual research and exploration will always have a place — it’s how we learn and how we double-check that AI is providing accurate information. That said, having a deep research assistant is useful. I decided to test one out using Perplexity.

Getting set up with Perplexity

The setup is simple. Go to Perplexity’s website and log in. I’m using the free version, but if you want access to the latest models, deeper sourcing and no usage limits, go for the Pro version at $15/month. 

Make sure to select the Deep research tab. It looks like I only have one query available, so let’s see how far free gets me.

What’s really cool is that you can control where it sources information from. It pre-selects the web, but I toggled that off and used Academic. This is great for work and study purposes, as Perplexity says it “prioritizes results from scholarly databases, journals, and reputable academic publications, filtering out non-academic or general web sources.”

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