If you don’t like Siri on your iPhone, too bad—you’re stuck with it. Even as Apple wants to sprinkle it up with Apple Intelligence, it’s still very lacking compared to other assistants. Perplexity’s Assistant is finally on iOS, and if you’re willing to do some workarounds, it’s pretty good.

Perplexity has rolled out a significant update to its iOS app, introducing a new Voice Assistant feature designed to bring advanced conversational AI capabilities to iPhone and iPad users. This has previously rolled out to Android, and for what it’s worth, it’s pretty good. It features integration with a lot of apps such as Spotify, so it can perform tasks for you, and when it can’t, it’s still the same conversational Perplexity chatbot we’ve come to know and use. I’ve used it as the assistant on my Google Pixel 9 Pro, and I found it to be pretty good, though I did roll back to Gemini due to the better third-party app support.

The new Perplexity assistant can perform a wide array of tasks by interfacing with various apps and system functions. It can provide directions and real-time traffic updates using Apple Maps, it lets you set reminders, book rides through services like Uber, and manage calendar events (scheduling and editing). It can make reservations via compatible booking websites, draft and send emails directly, initiate messages through iMessage or other compatible apps, and place phone calls. And when it’s not performing tasks for you, you can ask it general knowledge questions, and it will leverage its selection of LLMs to answer them for you—Perplexity has a selection of models including OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet. It’s pretty complete, and it excels in a lot of scenarios where Siri lacks a lot.

The downside here is that while this is by all means a better assistant than Siri, you can’t actually fully “replace” Siri as your phone’s assistant with this. Siri is the default voice assistant on iPhones and iPads, and setting a different assistant within easy reach requires workarounds. Instead, this is accessed through the Perplexity app on your iPhone, though there is a shortcut that you can either put in your lock screen or assign to your phone’s Action button for quick access. So it might not be your phone’s main AI assistant, but you can still access it quickly as if it were.

The new assistant is now rolling out as an update to the Perplexity app, so make sure to grab it from the App Store now.

Source: Perplexity (X/Twitter) via MacRumors