Chat with a model hosted on perplexity.ai

Sign up at https://www.perplexity.ai.

Perplexity AI is a platform for running LLMs that are capable of searching the web in real-time to help them answer questions with information that may not have been available when the model was trained.

This function is a lightweight wrapper around chat_openai() with the defaults tweaked for Perplexity AI.

Usage

chat_perplexity(
  system_prompt = NULL,
  base_url = "https://api.perplexity.ai/",
  api_key = perplexity_key(),
  model = NULL,
  seed = NULL,
  params = NULL,
  api_args = list(),
  echo = NULL,
  api_headers = character()
)

Arguments

system_prompt

A system prompt to set the behavior of the assistant.

base_url

The base URL to the endpoint; the default uses OpenAI.

api_key

API key to use for authentication.

You generally should not supply this directly, but instead set the PERPLEXITY_API_KEY environment variable. The best place to set this is in .Renviron, which you can easily edit by calling usethis::edit_r_environ().

model

The model to use for the chat (defaults to "llama-3.1-sonar-small-128k-online"). We regularly update the default, so we strongly recommend explicitly specifying a model for anything other than casual use.

seed

Optional integer seed that ChatGPT uses to try and make output more reproducible.

params

Common model parameters, usually created by params().

api_args

Named list of arbitrary extra arguments appended to the body of every chat API call. Combined with the body object generated by ellmer with modifyList().

echo

One of the following options:

• none: don't emit any output (default when running in a function).

• output: echo text and tool-calling output as it streams in (default when running at the console).

• all: echo all input and output.

Note this only affects the chat() method.

api_headers

Named character vector of arbitrary extra headers appended to every chat API call.

Value

A Chat object.

See also

Other chatbots: chat_anthropic(), chat_aws_bedrock(), chat_azure_openai(), chat_cloudflare(), chat_databricks(), chat_deepseek(), chat_github(), chat_google_gemini(), chat_groq(), chat_huggingface(), chat_mistral(), chat_ollama(), chat_openai(), chat_openrouter(), chat_portkey()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
chat <- chat_perplexity()
chat$chat("Tell me three jokes about statisticians")
} # }