12 Comments
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rena's avatar

What a marvelous case of serendipity! Helping someone on the fly!

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Evelyne Luethy's avatar

This will be so helpful to so many people.

I love that you highlight the difference between a search engine and tools like perplexity.

I have an example for this. I was planning my trip to Tromsø and looked at a map. I saw that there was a McDonald's - that was not there in February 2020. So, I asked AI (Copilot on this instance) where the northernmost McDonald's in the world was. It came back with Rovaniemi, Finland. Totally wrong. Tromsø is way higher up north. I've been to both places.

What happened here was that this was too recent (I asked in December, the McDonald's in Tromsø opened in April 2024) and Rovaniemi had spent years on promoting themselves as having the northernmost McDonald's in the world. It's all about frequency and number of hits.

If you ask AI about the northernmost Burger King. It gets it right. That one's been around in Tromsø for long enough and they promoted it as such.

Know your tools is the name of the game - I guess. So thank you for this.

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Alexander Verbeek's avatar

Thank you, Evelyne. A great example 😊

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Mark Lovett's avatar

I'm a big fan of Perplexity, especially the suggested follow-up questions, as it often suggests better questions than I can come up with myself. I also played with the voice mode today, asking what sites I should visit in Philadelphia that relate to Benjamin Franklin. In seconds it replied with a list of 7 locations I should put on my must see list. I may set up a Space for further research - haven't tried that yet.

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Alexander Verbeek's avatar

That’s a typical example of making good use of Perplexity. A google search effort would have given you a pile of links that may, after 20 minutes have led to the same result (or far less complete) than what you got now.

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Wifa Hasan's avatar

Brilliant! 👏🫡

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Alexander Verbeek's avatar

Thank you, Wifa 😊

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Judith L Hubbard's avatar

WOW; 449 subscribers already! So proud of our fearless content creator! Looking forward to engaging more. Still tied up in Hurricane Helene recovery and finding things during reconstruction. Massive project at my pace 🐢. Great news; loggers are coming I think! To finish clearing downed trees and massive stumps. Then I can have some creative distractive fun from my sofa. 😘

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Diane’s Blue Forum 👩‍💻's avatar

Going to try it!

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Little Gray's avatar

As with any Service take the time to carefully read their Privacy Policy (yeah I know!) and see what you’re feeding them for the ability to use the App and learn how much of it you can control.

An excerpt :

“You may also have the ability to sync your third party email account or calendar (such as Gmail and Google Calendar) with the Services. If you choose to sync these accounts, we will have access to your contacts and information from the email messages and calendar appointments in your email account, including the content of your emails (together, “Email Service Information”)”

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Alexander Verbeek's avatar

Yes, I agree it is always good to check. Thank you. In this case: Perplexity doesn’t have access to sensitive information like emails and calendar items, unless you explicitly give permission (and that is only possible on Android; on iOS, Perplexity functions as a general AI assistant without deep app integrations). And as always, be aware that what you share.

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rena's avatar

No one I trust more than you. Thank you!

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