The future is here - Perplexity AI wants to be your “AI doctor”; offers medical advice

For a long time, tech companies stayed away from giving medical advice. The legal risks are high, and giving the wrong health information can be dangerous or even fatal.

However, Perplexity is changing this with the launch of Perplexity Health - a new feature that uses AI to analyze your personal medical data, and offer medical advice.

Perplexity says the AI can now connect to your personal health information. This includes data from fitness trackers like Fitbit, Withings, and Apple Health via the Apple Watch.

To train the AI, the company is relying on the help of “hospital records”, lab results and electronic records from 1.7 million care providers.

“Perplexity Health tracks metrics and trends over time across biomarkers and activity data through a personalized dashboard. Ask a health question and the answer draws from your medical records, lab results, and wearable data at once. A question about resting heart rate, for example, can factor in your recent activity, your cardiac history, and your latest bloodwork.”

The idea is that if you ask a question about your heart rate, the AI doesn't just give a general answer. It looks at your actual exercise history and your latest blood tests to give a personalized response.

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To avoid mistakes, Perplexity says the system will also use professional medical journals and clinical guides. A board of real doctors was created to check the AI's work, too. That said, giving medical advice is a big step for a smartphone app - even if it’s powered by AI trained by medical professionals. Existing telehealth apps tend to rely on real doctors with real medical degrees.

When it comes to health, privacy is another potential concern. Perplexity promises your data is encrypted and will not be used to train their AI models.

While the tech is impressive, it is not a replacement for a real doctor. We will have to wait and see if this becomes a helpful tool or a legal nightmare for the company.

For now, this feature is reserved for “Pro” and “Max” Perplexity users in the US.