So Perplexity has a new tool?, I don’t really know what to call it. They call it a “general-purpose digital worker that operates the same interfaces you do”. That sounds more marketing-y than I’d like but it’ll have to do.
It’s called Perplexity Computer and you’ll need a Pro or Max account to use it.
Full disclosure, we haven’t used it much yet. We only have a Pro account and they just opened up access to it a few days ago. That’s why this is an “intro”.
The whole idea seems to be that you can give Computer tasks, like you would a co-worker, and it will run separately from everything else for as long as it needs to until it gets the job(s) done. According to Perplexity, Computer can run for months. Again, I haven’t even had access to it for months so I can vouch for how accurate this is.
It seems to thrive with complex multi-step projects. The example on the website has it -
- Go through every podcast episode
- Generate a transcript for each
- Extract each time a company is named
- Build an app that plots the company’s stock price over time
- Annotate on every date where it is mentioned
Computer analyzes the tasks, creates a plan, makes sub-agents for each of the tasks, etc. It looks like the different sub-agents can also use different AI models (i.e., one sub-agent uses Claude Opus 4.6 and another uses Gemini 3.1 Pro)
To access Computer, go to perplexity.ai then click on the Computer icon in the prompting area
The interface will change slightly and you can get started
Here is Perplexity’s product release page if you are interested - https://www.perplexity.ai/products/computer
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Cool Tool. Now What?
“Digital worker that runs for months” sounds impressive… until you’re staring at the prompt box wondering what to give it. Turn tools like this into actual workflows you’ll use.
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