Perplexity’s Comet has shot into the ‘browsersphere’ with its native agentic features. Powered by AI, Comet acts as a personal assistant and thinking partner (much like Iron Man’s Jarvis), helping you to find answers fast and manage your digital life.
Integrated with Gmail, calendar and various other services, Comet can schedule meetings, brief you on the day ahead, make sense of your inbox, messaging, social platforms and anything on the web. It can fill in forms, make bookings, construct and send emails or plan actions across sites. Comet can understand content, summaries, explanations and comparisons. It can navigate unfamiliar software, obtain rapid answers, research, summarise, translate and more. It can even act as a memory extension, locating things, reminding you of where you’ve seen something, or solutions you’ve already devised.
Perplexity’s addition joins OpenAI’s Operator, an AI agent launched earlier this year to perform autonomous tasks. Not to be outdone, Google announced that it’s rolling out Gemini in Chrome to all U.S. desktop users and bringing agentic capabilities to Chrome in the future.
This includes adding AI Mode search to the address bar, using its Nano model to detect and protect against AI-generated scams and automatically resetting compromised passwords. AI Mode enables users to ask complex questions, and layer on follow-ups to get into the details. You’ll also be able to ask questions about the page to get a helpful AI Overview.
U.S. users with English language settings can ask Gemini to summarise, simplify and adapt any web page information. It can compare and summarise information across multiple tabs and remind you of pages you’ve previously visited to relocate certain content.
With deeper integrations between Gemini in Chrome and other Google products, like Calendar and Maps, users can schedule meetings and see locations all from a single page while its YouTube integration enables you to locate a specific spot. Google’s AI assistant can take care of tedious tasks such as booking appointments and lining up grocery orders ready for you to check and pay.
So it would seem that the day of the personal AI assistant is here. Whilst many are treading cautiously into this brave new world amid concerns about privacy and granting unfettered access to personal information, the rise in its universal use, seems ultimately inevitable.
