American AI search engine developer Perplexity is launching the Sonar API with two subscription options - basic and advanced, the company stated in their blog.

Perplexity says that most generative AI capabilities only answer based on training data, which limits their capabilities. With Sonar, companies and developers can build generative search tools into their own applications.

"We’re also expanding public access to advanced features like JSON mode and search domain filters for select usage tiers," the release said.

  • The Sonar API can make citations and has the ability to customize sources. This is suitable for companies that need to quickly integrate lightweight question and answer functionality.
  • The Sonar Pro API can handle deep, multi-step queries with twice the number of references per search. It can also handle longer, more detailed queries and additional questions thanks to a larger context window.

The American AI company suggests using the API in sales, finance, non-profits, and advertising. But it says that some companies are already using the tool. Zoom, for example.

"With Sonar Pro, Zoom can offer live, real-time, and private searches for users that allow them to ask any question without having to exit the video call or open their browser."

Perplexity also claims that in the most common SimpleQA benchmark, Sonar Pro proved to be the best model in terms of facts.

  • The basic version of Sonar has a fixed price and costs $5 for every 1,000 queries, plus $1 for every 750,000 words you feed into the AI model (about 1 million input tokens) and another $1 for every 750,000 words the model outputs (about 1 million output tokens), TechCrunch writes.
  • Sonar Pro costs $5 for every 1,000 queries, plus $3 for every 750,000 words you feed into the AI model, and $15 for every 750,000 words the model outputs.

As a reminder, last November, Perplexity AI was in the final stages of raising $500 million in investment at a $9 billion valuation.