Perplexed by AI Assistant Choices?

This week, we delve into the world of AI-powered marketing tools, focusing on the capabilities of Perplexity.ai, and stack it up against its robust competitors in the ever-evolving domain of AI chat assistants.

Perplexity.ai, enters the crowded chat-based generative AI market, up against the behemoth that is ChatGPT4 as well as a number of its chatbot offspring like Jasper, and Copy.ai, as well as established rivals in the space such as Gemini.

Similarly priced to the competition, at $20/month for the Pro edition, Perplexity has a few added Large Language Models (LLMs) behind it. For the same price as ChatGPT4 you get access to ChatGPT3.5 & 4, Claude 2.1, Gemini Pro and Perplexity's own LLM. Not a bad package deal. And like the competition, it does offer a free ChaGPT 3.5 version.

ChatGPT4

ChatGPT4, the latest iteration from OpenAI, has remarkable language understanding and context retention, establishing a new standard for conversational AI. Its advanced conversational capabilities enable interactive engagement, making it a valuable asset across a wide range of marketing tools. Additionally, its impressive human-like text generation lends itself well to creating diverse marketing collateral.  One notable difference however, is that CHatGPT4 has to be prompted to provide sources and citations, where Perplexity does this automatically.

Another important difference, that can make a huge difference in certain use cases, comes down to what these two tools really are. ChatGPT is, by definition, a chat assistant. Perplexity is that PLUS a form of search engine with direct access to the internet. It's what's known, in the emerging language of AI, as an "answer engine".

This direct access to the internet is at first hard to get your head around. Surely when I ask ChatGPT a question, it goes and finds the answer by scouring the entire internet? But in fact LLMs work by being pre-fed their context and using that historical data to predict the answer you need.  This is why ChatGPT3 was so limited in terms of up-to-date information, as its knowledge-base stopped at September, 2021. OpenAI claims that ChatGPT4 is now updated through January 2022 but most users find that it "misses" key events between the two updates.

By contrast, Perplexity has no such gap since it uses both trained LLMs, and access to the internet in real time. This is pretty fundamental when it comes to things like market research or anything where the answer is significantly effected by information in the last 2 years. Most things, one assumes!!

Copy.ai

Copy.ai is dedicated to transforming how content creators ideate and produce copy for marketing purposes.  Its diverse templates facilitate rapid content production and a user-friendly interface appeals to those less tech-savvy. It's tailored for copy specific to marketing objectives and campaigns.

However, it lacks the depth of analytic tools that a platform like Perplexity.ai offers and suffers from the same time-sensitivity limitations as ChatGPT.

Gemini

Google's Gemini (formerly know as Bard) seeks to harmonize comprehensive web knowledge with the creativity and versatility of AI. One of the advantages of this platform is its ability to leverage a vast amount of internet data, ensuring the delivery of relevant content. Additionally, it fosters a unique combination of creativity and accuracy in generating informational content. Given its ubiquitous search engine parent, it goes without saying that Gemini, like Perplexity, has direct and real-time access to the internet.  It both uses this access to augment its LLM, and also uses it as a double-check on its answers.

On the downside, this platform is currently less recognized for its marketing-specific applications. 

Jasper

Jasper is the hard-core marketing application of the AI assistant landscape.  It's newly-launched UI is specifically designed for marketers to develop content such as white-papers, long and short form blog articles, posts, press releases and much more. It has an extensive library of templates for marketing content, and a smart widget for re-writing prompts to optimize output.

Unlike Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Copy.ai, Jasper takes some commitment in terms of learning curve and getting the most out of its abilities. For the most part, the other three are single-box entry UIs, similar to a google search, where all that's expected is a single prompt.  To work best, Jasper needs to be fed brand and business information (URLs, documents), given direction on target, tone and other contextual inputs. But with practice and patience, the outputs get progressively better and on-brand.

Conclusion

Each platform brings unique strengths to the table. Perplexity.ai excels with its holistic analytical insights, and real-time information, ChatGPT4 shines in conversational engagement and simple prompt-response format, Copy.ai in user-friendliness, and Gemini in creative output. Your choice may hinge on whether you prioritize depth of analysis, ease of use, conversational ability, or creative content backed by widespread data.

As a rule of thumb, this might be a good way to view these tools. While paying for all of them may be cost-prohibitive, you might be able to identify your most typical use-case and select on that basis:

Perplexity: Research and content that is heavily dependent on real-time information
Chat GPT4: Easy-to-use, smart and conversational answers; the Swiss Army Knife of AI assistants
Copy.ai: Pure-play copywriting projects
Gemini: Research and real-time context, plus creativity in output
Jasper: Marketing-specific content development

#AI #marketing