Perplexity has introduced a new memory-driven personalisation layer for its AI assistants, and it now remembers user preferences, interests, and key details from earlier chats to give faster and more personalised answers. The feature forms part of the company’s wider shift toward agentic AI through its Comet Assistant, and it helps the system use past context with greater accuracy.
The company said its assistants now pull together important details automatically—such as favorite brands, dietary needs, and common keywords—and they preload this context when they respond to new questions. Instead of treating old chats like broad training data, Perplexity retrieves exact details from a user’s private memory store to offer better precision and flow across sessions.
Perplexity, led by co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas, described this update as a step toward assistants that act like a “second brain” and an operator for daily tasks and research. The company said the memory feature works across models, and users can switch between slower reasoning models, faster models, or more specialised models without losing their personal context.
Perplexity refers to this as “context portability”, and it allows a user’s work to move forward even as models change. The system pre-loads important details from earlier chats so users do not need to repeat information when they return to a topic. It retrieves exact items from a private memory store rather than making broad guesses from the past. It can also handle prompts such as product suggestions that match fitness needs or injury history, travel reading ideas based on taste, and holiday gift picks shaped by earlier conversations.
Perplexity has also stressed privacy and user control. Users can turn memories off, and incognito mode disables both memory and search history by default. The company said all data is encrypted, and users can opt out of model improvement through the AI Data Retention option.
A Help Centre note explains that memories and past searches may appear in personalised answers, and users can view or clear them in Settings. Perplexity’s launch arrives as rivals roll out long-term memory features as well. Anthropic has added memory for Claude across its Team and Enterprise plans and later to Pro and Max, with fine-grained controls and incognito chats.
Microsoft has added long-term memory and updated controls in Copilot, with clear documentation on storage and admin rules. OpenAI has also updated ChatGPT with project-scoped memory and a daily Pulse preview that uses memory and chat history.
