Tame Your Inbox: Perplexity’s New AI Assistant for Gmail & Outlook
▼ Summary
– Perplexity’s Email Assistant can review, organize, and draft emails, performing tasks like summarizing threads and suggesting meeting times.
– The assistant is available exclusively to paid subscribers of the $200/month Perplexity Max tier and connects to Gmail or Outlook.
– This tool represents Perplexity’s effort to capture a share of the enterprise productivity market, competing with AI from Google and Microsoft.
– AI companies are heavily marketing to businesses, aiming to make their tools habitual and indispensable parts of daily workflows.
– The Email Assistant is SOC 2- and GDPR-compliant and, according to Perplexity, is not trained on user interactions.
Managing an overflowing email inbox can feel like a full-time job in itself. Perplexity’s new Email Assistant aims to reclaim that lost time by integrating directly into Gmail and Outlook, offering a suite of AI-powered tools to review, organize, and even draft emails. Available now for subscribers of the premium Perplexity Max plan, this assistant tackles the monotonous tasks that clog up a professional’s day.
The tool connects to your desktop or mobile email app to perform a variety of functions. It can suggest optimal meeting times by checking your calendar availability and generate concise summaries of long, tangled email threads. This capability mirrors a feature found in Comet, Perplexity’s own AI-driven web browser. The assistant also helps with organization by automatically labeling messages by type and ordering your priorities. It can even tell you when your next meeting is with a specific colleague by searching through your inbox history.
This new offering enters a crowded field of high-end AI tools targeting business users. Its features appear similar to some already available through Google’s Gemini in Gmail, such as Personalized Smart Replies and natural-language search for finding information. However, Gemini is confined to Gmail, while Perplexity’s assistant also works with Outlook, which has its own set of AI features via Microsoft’s Copilot. Perplexity emphasizes that the Email Assistant is SOC 2- and GDPR-compliant and is not trained on user interactions, addressing potential privacy concerns.
Access to the Email Assistant is gated behind Perplexity’s $200 per month Max subscription tier. This launch represents the AI startup’s latest strategic move to capture a share of the highly competitive workplace productivity market. Across the tech industry, there is a significant push to sell AI solutions to enterprises, with the goal of making these tools indispensable components of the daily workflow.
Tech giants are aggressively pursuing this enterprise focus. Microsoft has partnered with Anthropic to weave AI into platforms like Excel and Word. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly developing a platform to rival Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365. The strategy often involves embedding AI into tools people already use habitually, hoping the new functionality becomes second nature. Google recently made its Gemini AI available directly within the Chrome browser via a dedicated widget, following this exact playbook.
Perplexity is employing a similar tactic. By embedding its Email Assistant directly into the inboxes of knowledge workers, the company is betting it can become a fundamental AI solution for businesses. This move intensifies its competition with established players like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
For those who are already Perplexity Max subscribers, trying the new assistant is straightforward. You can visit a dedicated page to connect your Outlook or Gmail account. To get a feel for its capabilities, Perplexity recommends starting with a simple prompt like, “What needs my attention first?” This allows users to immediately see how the AI can help prioritize their workload.
(Source: ZDNET)
