Perplexity announced Thursday that it is beginning to roll out an agentic AI for Android devices, called Perplexity Assistant, which will be able to independently take multi-step actions on behalf of its user.
“We are excited to launch the Perplexity Assistant to all Android users,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote in a post to X on Thursday. “This marks the transition for Perplexity from an answer engine to a natively integrated assistant that can call other apps and perform basic tasks for you.”
The Assistant will be available through the Perplexity mobile app and will run atop the platforms existing “answer engine” model. As such, Assistant will have access to the internet. With it, users will be able to set reminders and future actions, much like ChatGPT‘s new Tasks feature offers. For example, the agent will be able to remind users of an upcoming event by automatically creating a calendar entry at the correct time and date.
Users can also use it to take more immediate action such as hailing a ride share or searching for a song, the company noted. The new feature can also access the user’s camera so you could, in theory, ask it to look for restaurants in your immediate area and then have it make reservations for you.
Perplexity Assistant is free to use as part of the mobile app and will initially be available in 15 languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. How well it will interact with other agentic AIs on the device, such as Gemini or ChatGPT Tasks, remains to be seen.
Agents are the hot new thing in generative AI. These lightweight models are often “distilled” from larger LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, but are tasked with interpreting data and autonomously taking action rather than generating content. These actions can be straightforward, like automatically transcribing a Zoom call, or multi-step — think, having it plan an 8-course meal, shop for necessary ingredients on Instacart, then email invites to your guests.
The market is already being saturated with AI agents from the various leading companies. Anthropic kicked off the agentic race in November when it debuted its Computer Use API, which enables Claude to emulate human mouse and keyboard actions to control the local computing system. Microsoft announced Copilot Actions the same month and began rolling the agents out to business and enterprise subscribers in January. Nvidia followed suit at CES 2025 when it revealed its new Nemotron family of LLMs, and OpenAI finally unveiled its AI agent, Operator, as a “research preview” just a few hours ago.
Not long ago, Apple treated independent repair like an act of outright hostility. The Cupertino giant locked down parts with serial-number pairing, while repair tools remained firmly out of reach of anyone outside its authorized repair network. More importantly, the company waged a legal and lobbying battle against right-to-repair legislation.
I've covered enough of these fights over the years to know what a shift looks like. That's why what happened in October 2026 genuinely caught me off guard. The day the iPhone Duo went on sale, what may be the most mechanically complex iPhone to date, Apple pulled off a surprising about-face. It published teardown-style repair manuals for a handful of major components.
Apple's first foldable phone is now on shelves, in short supply, but with an unreal amount of buzz around it. After all, it's the first foldable iPhone, and there's plenty that this phone gets right. But there's also a lot that is either broken or underwhelming. What's peculiar is the dialogue around this phone, and how it has completely overshadowed every other attempt at making a phone with a similar form factor.
I've spent some time with the iPhone Duo, and I've used the Galaxy Z Fold 8 for almost three months now. In my opinion, Samsung deserves more credit. When the Galaxy Z Fold 8 arrived earlier this year, it was celebrated in some circles and ridiculed in others for supposedly copying what Apple would eventually deliver with the iPhone Duo. The dialogue was pretty odd, for multiple reasons. Samsung has been making foldable phones for years, so claiming that it copied a product Apple hadn't even launched was simply absurd.
For years, Samsung’s Galaxy A phones have been some of the easiest recommendations for anyone who wants to go the Android route without paying flagship prices. But that part of the lineup could soon become harder to find at a good price.
According to South Korea’s Electronic Times, Samsung is cutting Galaxy A production by about 20% in the fourth quarter compared to its original plans. Component orders have reportedly dropped by a similar amount, which could mean roughly 10 million fewer phones over the year. Samsung is also said to be considering another production cut of more than 10% next year.