Are you tired of seeing Meta AI popping up everywhere in your favorite apps? From Facebook to Instagram, including Messenger and WhatsApp, Meta's artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly present, sometimes even to the point of being activated by mistake. If you're looking for a simple and straightforward alternative within your favorite messaging service, a new option has just appeared, joining other AIs already available.
After ChatGPT, which paved the way a few months ago, it's now the turn of Perplexity AI, the conversational search engine, to integrate with WhatsApp. No more juggling between apps: you can now query this AI directly from your chats, and it's incredibly simple.
No account required
One of the major advantages of this integration is its ease of use. There's no need to create a dedicated Perplexity account or go through complex setup to use it via WhatsApp. Simply add Perplexity AI's phone number to your contacts to start the conversation.
How do I do it? It's very simple:
- Save the following number in your phonebook: +1 (833) 436-3285.
- Open WhatsApp.
- Create a new chat with this newly added contact.
- Start asking your questions!
What features are there on WhatsApp?
According to Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, who announced this new feature on X (formerly Twitter), the AI can provide answers, cite its sources, and even generate images directly within the WhatsApp interface. He also promises that "many more features are coming soon."
The arrival of these artificial intelligences on WhatsApp allows users to query an AI without leaving their main messaging app, offering time savings and fluidity. For AI companies like Perplexity and OpenAI, it's also a way to reach a wider audience, especially in markets where users spend a lot of time on social apps and where WhatsApp traffic sometimes doesn't count against monthly mobile data plans. This is Meta's argument for the deep integration of its own AI.
Points of vigilance not to overlook
However, before you rush to add that new contact, there are important questions to ask, particularly regarding the privacy of your data. The article I used as a basis raises a crucial point: recent statements from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas indicated that the company's future browser could track everything about users in order to serve them targeted ads. A rather worrying prospect.
Even though WhatsApp exchanges benefit from end-to-end encryption, what Perplexity AI does with the information you transmit to it once it arrives on the "other side" of the conversation can raise questions, especially in light of these advertising ambitions. Another element to consider: Perplexity AI does not rely solely on its own artificial intelligence models. To provide its answers, it uses models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and X. Some users might therefore legitimately wonder if it would not be better to contact the source AIs directly. Finally, while convenient, the user experience via WhatsApp could prove to be less complete or less intuitive than that offered by the dedicated mobile or web applications of Perplexity or ChatGPT.
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