How to Use Perplexity!

That tech pastor here and another video to dive into another space. And so what I want to do is give you more introductory videos about some different AI tools out there. And today we're going to look at Perplexity. Now Perplexity to me is one of the funner tools to use. It's a great research agent, a great research assistant. I think it really can assist the work you do. Now. It prides itself of being a research based space. And so today we're going to dive into Perplexity on how to use Perplexity ways that you can use it for your church, use it for your nonprofit, use it for your ministry, your business, whatever. It is very basic, very in general to it. And I also have cheat sheets on Perplexity as well. So if you want that cheat sheet, the link is below in the comments too. But today we're going to jump into how to use Perplexity, their ui, what makes it good about the user experience. And you guys already know if you ain't heard it from that deck, faster than real. So let me give you the business for your business today, diving into how to use Perplexity. So what do I like about Perplexity? So what's really cool to me about Perplexity is Perplexity is a research assistant. So I've been using it more than I've been using Google. It gives you sources when you go to it. It gives you resources. You can search social media. I mean it can do so many amazing things. And so While I use ChatGPT to help me do some research as well, I really like Perplexities added benefit of the sources diving into social media. So, so some use cases that I've used Propaxity for is for churches, right? So searching social media, being able to search Yelp Pages and search TikTok and search Instagram. I've also used it for some deep research functions which you'll see in a second as well. Now just caveat for me, I use the free version of Perplexity, so you're going to get the version of it that's free. The Pro version is far more advanced to give you more tools and things of that nature. But I like using Perplexity. I pay for ChatGPT and I pay for a bunch of other tools and I didn't feel the need to pay for Perplexity as well because I have Google's AI search, which we'll get to to another video, which I believe Perplexity outdoes it. But Gemin is also in my email. So that's why I pay for it. So Perplexity for me, I will have the free version of it. So for those of you who have the free version, there's so much you can do inside Perplexity. I think it's a great research assistant for those of you who are preparing sermons or speeches. It's a great assistant for you. It does not do to me a very good job of writing in your voice, even when you train it. But it's great to train your Perplexity as well. So we're going to dive into Perplexity. Let's go right to their website. Very simple webpage, Perplexity. And when you come to Perplexity AI, this is what you're going to see on your screen. First of all, you're going to see what do you want to know? Remember, Perplexity is a research assistant. Perplexity's goal is to help you research things. So the first thing Plex is going to do, you have the. You have the home Home here is going to take you to just general home. And the general home here is going to give you the basic interface. You have the opportunity to get enhanced queries. You have the opportunity for deep research. I like their deep research function. I'll show you some things that I've done with the deep research. You also then have here choosing a model so you can choose different models to use inside of Perplexity. So you can see claw 3.7s here. ChatGPT 4.0 Gemini 2.0 Flash Grok Point Grok 2. They have different reasoning models as well. I talked about another video. What reasoning models are in essence large language models. You put something in, it's going to give you something immediately. Reasoning is going to pause and think about before it gives you something. This model here, Clara 3.7 sonnet. You guys already know my love for claw 3.7. Incredible. So there you go. But then here what it can do as well. Just select the best model for these queries based upon what you're doing. It'll just select it for you so you don't have to worry about picking the right one. Then you have here where it can set the sources for search. So you can set whether you're going to do web sources, academic sources or social sources as well. We'll do both. So you can all three, so you can see what all comes up for you. And then you can attach files as well. Now I have the free version. So you guys see very clearly here. I can attach up to 10 files today because I have the free version. And then here, if I wanted to dictate my question to perplexity, I could easily do that. Also, once you see in their ui, you also have here Discover. So Discover is like a for you page on your TikTok based upon what my interests are and I'm going to show you how I told them my interests. It gives me a for you page stories that I'm going to want to see in here. And then also people have put some of these together as well. So all of these are not just from new sources, these are from other people as well, putting their stories together. And as you can see as you look through mine, all, all I care about is technology, politics, sports, gaming. Technology, politics, sports, gaming, which go up here. Tech, science, sports, finance, culture. It's kind of funny. And the top story is probably going to look very different. Yeah, it's all politics there. So I'm good. I really keep my stuff here because this stuff gets draining for you. I'd rather learn more about Minecraft than learn about tariffs. It's crazy. You have spaces. Spaces are really cool to me. Spaces are a space where you're able then to. You can see, upload files and add instructions. Very similar to projects on ChatGPT where you're able to use this to collaborate other people, then also really, in essence segment your work down to one space. You're able to engage intentionally with one thing. So if you're doing particular research, something deep research to me is really great for students and for staffs, especially small organization staff, or I've used this for small church staffs as well. We're able to upload files, collaborate with people, share it in a knowledge base, all of that for spaces. I think this is an untapped resource to really use. Then you have your library. These are all the things that I've already, I've searched through and, and gone through. And I'll show you one of the deep researches I did a while ago as I was doing something actually helped me prepare for a sermon. I'll show you how deep research assisted me. All right, so as we get started with Perplexity, a couple of things I really challenge you to do is to do this. So if you go into your settings and you click on your account, get a chance to introduce yourself and that way you can really tell it, like who you are, some of your writing styles, some of the things you're working on. And the trick that I use for this is I actually just went directly in my chatGPT and said, hey, I'm making perplexity custom instructions. Can you just give me the customer instructions for perplexity and go in there also under your settings you're able to then take some time to engage with, you know which one. Call it deeper customer instructions, deeper questions about yourself, things of that nature. All right, so let's do a good prompt into reply. So do a deep dive for me. So act as a marketing director and do a deep dive. And do a deep dive into black churches and attendance. Ten trends among different groups, age, social status, D.C. so did a basic one just to see here, but just told it to totally what to do. Told the role to have as a social analyst and do a deep dive into black churches. So the goal, the task here, so the role of social analyst, the task here is to deep dive into black churches. And the goal here is to analyze attendance trends among different groups. You see what happens. So now, I mean it is pulling sources. I didn't told this to do deep research, so it's not giving me deep research, which probably took a lot longer for us, but already that quickly it got 60 sources. So it's telling, it's telling you how it's thinking. So it's reasoning for us as well. And now, I mean this is phenomenal. It's giving us a lot of extra stuff going into this. And this was not me doing deep research. This was not me doing hard work. But this was just a basic thing. You can see here the response it gives us. So one of the things about Plexi's responses is going to be very to the point. All the sources that are listed with it, cultural shift, structure. I mean all this type of stuff is kind of cool. Cool I love also it always gives you extra questions to ask as well. So you can always ask extra questions to go from there. Now this is a very basic ask. I'm going to take this same ask here and this time we're going to take this and go back home, put this in. We're going to do deep research, right? We're going to do deep research, not pro research. We're going to deep research and we're going to set the sources to be social and academic. We're going to turn the web off just to see how different it's going to be when we do a deep research and turn off the web search and see what social spaces say about this as well. So let's give it a chance. Now this is gonna take a minute. So that's gonna go. And while that's going, I'm gonna tell you about my book. So I wrote a book called the Church of AI and the Church of AI is a book that talks about ethics and theology and all of that when it comes to artificial intelligence. And so please, if you have a chance, go on Amazon or my website, jluster.com, i wrote a book on all this stuff and would love to get your opinions and thoughts on it as well to engage with this work. I love to see the growth of it. It's crazy. I wrote this book a year ago and gratefully I wrote it on theology and ethics, which seem to be a lot slower than the movement of AI but it gives you a lot of terms, gives you a lot of things to define so that this stuff that's going to be some stuff's going to be constant while a lot of things are changing in the field as well. So my book called Church of AI also written a book called what the Heck Is AI? Which is just literally analyzing what the heck AI is. And so have some fun with both of those. Love to get your feedback. And please, if you purchase it on Amazon, leave a review for me. That'd be so helpful so I can help get the book to the masses as well. So this is doing deep research. You can see so far it's got 70 sources. I'm going to let this go. I'm going to open up another tab and we'll go back to Perplexity so you guys can see what else is going on in Perplexity while that's going. So some other work I've done here, like, so I'll go to my library. So you see, we did discover the going to my library. These are all the things that I've done here. I've done some things for other churches as well. So let me see if I can find something. Yeah, so we did something here. Tell me something about Beats and Sony. This again, you can see the response it gave. So this time it not only gave us the answer, which was like the differences of Beats and Sony, very quick and to the point, this was not a enhanced search or anything of that nature, but then also gave us the opportunity to look at shopping. Remember, this is a web search as well. So now it gave us opportunities to shop. So if you wanted Beats headphones or if you wanted Sony headphones, we can go purchase these headphones through their particular websites. This is what I like about Perplexity. Perplexity gives you a chance to do this like it's, it's its whole, its own world, if you will. And so it's pretty cool to see all of this work in perplexity, to have some fun with perplexity. Here you can see now we, the deep research is finished. That was really quick. It says it can take up to 30 minutes. This took two minutes for us. And let's see. So you guys saw the first time we did just a regular pro search without doing deep research. We're without searching social and without searching, without searching academic. This was their response. We did deep research and in deep research on perplexity, this is the response it gave. You can see that it gave us. Hold on, let me go back to that. Do, do, do, do deep research. Okay. This is deep research. So in the deep research that it gave us, it gives us a lot more black church attendance trends and multi dimensional analysis of demographic shifts and social dynamics. I mean you can see, yeah, 2.1 hours compared to 1.2 hours weekly things. I mean it just really gave us a lot more data. A lot more data. This is where I'm at. This is where I'm at. There you go. So that's perplexity in a nutshell. I highly recommend using it. So what are some use cases? So what are some use cases? You come back to me, so what are some use cases for this? So some use cases for churches and use cases for you personally. So first of all, let's go churches for churches. There's no reason for you not to have an opportunity to do a deep dive into your community. Community. To do a deep dive into like what's going on in your church or what's going on your community. To know demographics and trends, to know what's important, to know what's impactful to your people. There's no excuse to me now to not know everything going on in your community. When it comes to artificial intelligence, when it comes to your community growth, all of that perplexity gives you a chance to literally have a whole marketing directing team in your fingertips, have a demographic team in your fingertips to know the community, to know what they like and what they don't like. Also, I believe perplexity gives you a chance also to use it for sermon prep. So I've used perplexity to help me with sermon prep where it's been able to do great lexicon of work for me, but it does not write well. So it does not write the sermon for you, but it does great research for you. If you click deep research also this Gives you a demographic guide to you. So I've had churches that have used this for TikTok searches, churches that have used this for Instagram searches and YouTube searches to search what people think about their church. Search the Google reviews and code through it and get some information back to you. It puts out good tables, it puts out good things for you as well. So try it out on that side. For those of you personally, I use it for my news source in the morning. I use it as a great space to do all my Google search, all my searching. So now I summarize all my search because instead of me having to go to five websites, it does a summary for me. If you use the web search like ARC, or if you use another one of those spaces that Perplexity Church built in, you're able to just simply get Perplexity to do that harder work for you. So, like, you know what's going on today in the city, what's on TV tonight. Instead of you having to go TV Guide to TV one, it does all that for you. Consider that as well for dates. Consider that for going out with your spouse, things with your children. To me, Perplexity is a great, great space for everyone to use. Easy onboarding, easy way to get engaged. Make sure you get your custom instructions. You put your personality in there. You line up all the things that you are. Make it work for you. Remember, AI is a tool. It's not the house, so don't build your life on it. But it becomes a great tool to help enhance it. As always, if you want my custom instruction seat, it's on my website. If you want anything else too, it's on my website, jrlester.com on resources. I look forward to continue to serve you guys and to put content like this out. If there's another tool that you're interested in playing with, please let me know. Outside of that, I'm here to give the business for your business that you might grow, be all that God's called you to be. I'm praying for you. I love you. Thank you for following along the journey with me and artificial intelligence. I look forward to serving you in the future. God bless you, Sam.