SoftBank is offering its mobile customers a free one-year subscription to Perplexity Pro

SoftBank has announced that starting June 19, 2024, it will accept applications from customers of its SoftBank, Y!mobile, and LINEMO mobile services to access a one-year subscription to Perplexity Pro free of charge. Current pricing for Perplexity Pro subscriptions in Japan is about $20 per month or $200 per year. The free Perplexity Pro trial for SoftBank customers resulted from a strategic partnership between the companies announced earlier this year.

It is easy to see how this strategic partnership benefits both companies, as the trial for SoftBank customers easily fits on Perplexity's plan to generate more revenue from its paid subscription, and SoftBank can make its brand more appealing to existing and prospective customers by incorporating AI-powered service into its offerings without having to face the challenges of developing an in-house solution. SoftBank did venture into the LLM industry with SB Intutions, a 100% SoftBank-owned company devoted to the research and development of LLMs specialized for Japanese. There aren't too many details on this project available, and it must have certainly been overshadowed by the fact that OpenAI has a Japan office since April, a milestone it celebrated by releasing a custom Japanese-optimized GPT-4 model.

In addition to the SoftBank partnership, Perplexity AI made waves after its CEO Aravind Srinivas announced on X that Perplexity will start showing answers to simple factual queries about weather, the time at a specific location, currency conversions and simple math problems directly through cards. This is not a new feature, because Perplexity was already capable of querying the web for this information. What is new is the decision to display the responses to those queries in visually appealing cards in an effort to keep users from using competing search engines like Google for those queries.