Remember when TV screens got so cheap, so good, and so flat that every sub-sector in tech began wedging them into everything? Maybe you do. This was back in the mid-2000s. I remember, as a high-schooler, thinking Big Tech had jumped the shark when a friend showed me a refrigerator with a TV screen embedded into it.
Then it was Bluetooth and IoT (Internet of Things) protocols. Then blockchain, even when it didn’t make sense. Now it’s AI. They’re putting AI everywhere they can. When Samsung announced on October 21 that it’d released a new Perplexity AI app for its smart TVs, I was ready to chalk it up to just another example of needless AI-ification, but on second glance, it actually makes sense.
not a bad idea
I was ready to be skeptical and kind of a jerk about Samsung’s Perplexity AI TV app, which is proudly bragging is the first Perplexity AI TV app on the market. Then I let my fingers slow down for a moment, and I realized that this is a low-lift creation.
Far be it from me to say what is and isn’t a difficult app to create. I’m no programmer. I’m a writer, not a coder. When I write code, I write c-o-d-e. But I can’t see how creating this app was a major operation. Plus, it’s free for users.
I’m a fan of Perplexity AI. I’ve written before about how it’s a better search-oriented AI than ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. It’s the best AI search tool out there, and I find myself using it as a search engine almost as much as I use actual search engines, like Google.
I can see the usefulness of having Perplexity AI’s simple query bar on the big screen in your living room, ready to field questions and tackle tasks. You can connect a physical keyboard to your TV or use an onscreen keyboard to type your queries, but the ladder would be tedious. The main way to ask queries is to use the Samsung TV’s voice control and speak them to Perplexity AI.
We all say that we’re on our phones and computers too much. It may just be a technicality, but Samsung TV’s Perplexity AI app could get people off their small screens during their endless AI conversations—”Where should I eat for dinner? What should I watch?”—even if only to get them onto their slightly less small TV screens.
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