So far, my experience with AI has been mixed. While Claude, Gemini Advanced offered some hope as being my go-to, so far, ChatGPT Plus and Microsoft CoPilot remain the best tools available to me for the kinds of work I want to do.

The tougher question remains, how to distinguish between these education tools:

• Brisk
• Diffit
• MagicSchool.ai
• Perplexity
• Poe
• SchoolAI

• TeacherMade

The real question is, “How many of these simply provide an interface to ChatGPT as a middleware type service?” Wouldn’t it be better to skip to ChatGPT from the get-go? 

Perplexity

As much as I enjoy using ChatGPT, it is for work purposes and I wanted something else to login to for personal use. Perplexity.ai appears to be a great fit for this since it allows you to adjust the backend AI as needed.

What’s more, it also provides some nice Chrome extensions, including this one I relied on to summarize an earlier draft of this blog entry:

Finally, you can attach an image with a heuristic or checklist, then apply it to any text you add. The CoPilot switch turns on web access, and that makes all the difference when loading external prompts that are TOO long (4000 characters appears to be the limit but I haven’t counted them).

A bit more on what CoPilot does in Perplexity…I’m not sure if it’s the same thing as Microsoft CoPilot or not, so that’s a little confusing:

 First, it “gets” you. By asking follow-up questions, it hones in on what you’re really after. No more drowning in irrelevant info. Second, it sums up the best findings for you, so no more sifting through pages of text. Third, it pulls from a universe of sources—academic papers, news, forums, you name it—to give you the full picture. Source: What is CoPilot via Perplexity

See some examples of CoPilot.

I have to admit that I’m pleased with Perplexity.ai at $20 a month. Sure, I had to cut a streaming service loose, but that’s OK given the return on investment here.

My only wish for a feature? 

Voice response on the mobile app a la ChatGPT 4. That would be helpful. However, I can speak to it, and it will provide a text response, fast.