Build your own Perplexity AI search engine in Slack

Perplexity is a great tool. It’s like having AI search Google for you, read all the websites it finds, and give you a nice summarised answer with some links to follow up with.

They have their standalone app, but if you want to integrate Perplexity into other apps, their API has a big limitation - it doesn’t give you the source links.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can build your own AI search engine, like Perplexity, inside Slack.

We’ll use a few tools to do this: Zapier to power the process, Brave as our search engine, PhantomJSCloud to parse content from the websites it finds, and OpenAI to create our summarised answers.

These are the steps we’ll follow:

1. Create a Slack channel for your AI queries.
2. Build a zap that searches your query and parses content from the search results.
3. Send combined content to the OpenAI API to create a summarised answer.
4. Finish the zap with a step that sends a summarised answer to a Slack thread.

You’ll need:

• Zapier paid account
• Brave Search API account
• PhantomJSCloud account
• An OpenAI Platform account and at least $10 of credit. Note: this is separate from their ChatGPT app

Let’s dive in.