In fact, just this week, Perplexity has released a new AI chatbot for use WhatsApp, Srinivas got into a war of words with privacy focused tech company Proton in a series of posts on X regarding an opinion about data collection, and of course, talking about tracking user data to serve ads as a core tenet to the company’s upcoming web browser supposedly called Comet. This isn’t all. The browser aspirations prove key, because Perplexity’s vision isn’t to compete with the web browsers we already know and use (the likes of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Brave or Vivaldi). There’s an agentic AI dream to be achieved.

Basically, web browsing that integrates AI agents that can autonomously perform tasks, such as booking travel or interacting with other web apps or services, from within the browser. Unlike traditional browsers (no matter how much AI integration they may claim, this generation’s browsers are traditional in the best sense), Comet will act as a contained operating system that can do more than the sum of extensions and add-ons that today’s browsers allow. The plan is to release this sometime in May.

Also Read: Perplexity launching an AI browser like Google Chrome with an aim to ‘browse’ you

It may well be a crucial early mover advantage for Perplexity, since we may see more on that front. OpenAI is believed to be working on a web browser, and if Google does have to sell Chrome depending on how the US Department of Justice antitrust scrutiny pan out, the buyer will inevitably focus on AI (Perplexity themselves have shown an interest, as has OpenAI).

Personalisation and memory would be key, as Perplexity explores building user profiles based on browsing habits, purchases, and preferences to deliver tailored experiences. But this is where the question of data collection, privacy and choice comes into play — something the folks at Proton had raised on X. There is no way around it. Perplexity will gave to find a balance of choice, and address inevitable user concerns. They’ve mostly been transparent in the AI journey thus far, why change track now?

For Perplexity, they’ve found inroads into the Android phone space this week (beyond the app they already have). For Srinivas, it was a case of striking while the iron is hot — Google is already on the backfoot with these antitrust investigations, and that gives phone makers more confidence to get into agreements that would compete with Gemini’s priority integration within Android. The result, a global partnership with Motorola that’ll see the Perplexity app being preloaded on their phones (and added to some existing phones with a software update, one would assume).

“Every smartphone powers on with pre-selected apps you didn’t choose: your browser, your search engine, your voice assistant, and other apps. You don’t have a choice. For Google, that’s a strategy,” the company had written in a blog post, that minced no words. But that wasn’t it. They noted how Google can keep outspending everyone else to stay the default, and the only solution is choice.

Also Read: Indian techie reveals he rejected Perplexity AI’s offer in 2022, calls it ‘worst financial decision ever’

Reminds me of a conversation I had with Rohan Verma, then CEO of MapmyIndia, who also fought a long battle to break Google’s monopoly in the map apps choice on Android phones. Their Mappls app, found traction once the Competition Commission of India, took action to stop the monopolistic tactics.

“At Perplexity, we don’t see ourselves as a competitor to Google. We’re building something different. We’re trying to give people another choice: search that answers, assistants that work. AI that’s intelligent, accurate, and trustworthy. Some consumers will choose both Google and Perplexity. Some will choose one or the other. That’s what choice looks like in a healthy ecosystem,” they added.

There’ll be deeper customisations for Motorola phones — availability on Razr devices’ external display when folded shut, access through Moto AI by typing ‘Ask Perplexity’, and allow users to send emails, set smart reminders, play media, request rides, as well as book restaurant reservations. Perhaps a vision towards what Perplexity can do with Android phones, if more phone makers were to sign up. New Motorola phones—including Razr and Edge 60 devices will bundle 3 months of Perplexity Pro.

That’s key — with hope these users will be willing to spend $20 a month later for the Pro subscription. The pitch is, also get access to Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Sonnet Thinking, OpenAI’s GPT 4.1 as well as o4-mini, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 3 Beta and the R1 1776, which Perplexity calls an “unbiased reasoning model”.

At the turn of the year, Perplexity added Assistant, an AI-powered tool integrated into its app — something that’s more than capable of performing tasks across multiple apps, such as booking rides or searching for songs, whilst maintaining context across actions. There was also a new Sonar model, which they claim performs better than frontier models such as the GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

The next 12 months will be a greater challenge for Perplexity, more than anything it has withstood thus far. The reason for that, is an aspiration to carve a space for itself amidst the AI conversation. Nothing tells me their future isn’t bright. It certainly will be a bumpy road, which Srinivas and his team seem more than willing to withstand.

Vishal Mathur is the technology editor for HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice-versa. The views expressed are personal.