Perplexity, the US-based search engine company that uses LLMs to process queries and synthesize responses, has recently come up with its AI-powered voice assistant for iPhones. The voice assistant is creating buzz, and some believe that it's better than Siri, Apple’s voice assistant. Here we’ll look into some important aspects of the AI voice assistant, like performance, activity, and readability, to understand the claim. 

Stephen Robles, the renowned tech reviewer, reviews the AI voice assistant to conclude, “ Even with limited access to iOS, @perplexity_ai has built a better Siri with its iPhone app than Apple, in his post on X. Let's move to the important aspects that Stephen Robles talks about in his comparison. 

Music 

In his comparison, he demonstrates that both assistants, Siri and Perplexity, are capable of playing music directly on Apple Music, hinting towards the outside app, Perplexity, having a substantial amount of access and control over the Apple environment in phones. On the other hand, Siri is unable to find songs with just the humming when the user doesn’t know the name of the song, while Perplexity can.

Podcasts 

As with music, Perplexity helps users search for hard-to-find podcasts as well as easy podcasts when they can’t play them directly. The user needs to tap the play button to play podcasts with Perplexity’s voice assistant. In contrast, Siri (native) can play it without the tap directly, but lacks the search intent. 

Maps and Reservations 

Apple’s Siri illustrates the route to wherever you want, whether your favorite restaurant or the salon you like the most, but you only need to make the bookings. On the other hand, Perplexity not only gives you local results with Apple Maps but also takes you to the OpenTable page to complete your reservation, which Siri cannot. 

This makes it the most sought-after AI voice assistant, beating the native voice assistant by Apple. 

Multi-step process 

Among the various functions supported by Perplexity’s AI Voice Assistant, it supports multi-step processes like sending emails, using YouTube, and general reliability. Perplexity wins the race with control over the localized Apple environment on iPhones. 

Overall, the reviewer finds Perplexity’s AI Voice assistant much better than Apple’s own Siri in reference to the abovementioned functions.