Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Perplexity
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
An answer engine for publicly available knowledge, Perplexity's Enterprise Pro plan helps employees get fast answers to their most complex questions without the usual need to click on different links, compare answers, or endlessly dig for information.
Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.
Perplexity is helpful when you want auto-code generation for day-to-day problem scenarios such as Powershell script to accomplish a task, Code to invoke a REST API, Class generation from JSON/XML data, etc. It is also helpful when you want to correct or optimize code that you have self-written. Perplexity might not be best suited for scenarios when you need 100% accuracy without your self-verification of correctness.
Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.
Perplexity allows users to enter the question in a single textbox "Ask Anything" and provides both direct responses and conversational interaction. Summarized responses from multiple sources are presented neatly in the User Interface. It maintains context understanding from the previous questions and provides interactive ways to refine questions. However, scrolling through the content is a bit challenging.
Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. Additionally, we're a Microsoft shop so it plugged into our cloud hosting package and client facing OS.
I have been using all the 3 products - ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Perplexity helps when ChatGPT and Gemini fail. There have been several instances when Chat GPT and Gemini provided inaccurate results and in those times Perplexity became a clear winner. However, in terms of usability, I feel ChatGPT has a slight edge.
Azure Search enabled us to stand up a robust search capability with very few developer hours.
The fully-managed service of Azure Search means we get low cost of management (EG, DevOps) going into the future, even though the cost of the service itself definitely reflects the time saved.
Azure Search counts as a "Cognitive Service" for Microsoft Azure consumption and aligns our products with Microsoft's interests of driving an AI-first approach in the enterprise. Microsoft Partners, service and product companies alike, should be looking to align with this AI vision as it means favorable treatment from the Microsoft sales teams.
