Samsung just handed your living room a new kind of search engine. Today, the company announced a partnership with Perplexity — the startup that built an AI-first “answer engine” — to bring a Perplexity TV app to Samsung sets. If you bought a 2025 Samsung TV, the app is already waiting in the apps tab (or via the AI Button on compatible remotes); owners of 2023 and 2024 models will get it later this year via an over-the-air update.

Why this matters: the living room is becoming another front in the AI wars. Phones and browsers already host assistant-style experiences from OpenAI, Google and others; stuffing a conversational search engine onto a big, communal screen changes the way families access information — and it offers Perplexity a direct route to eyeballs that usually spend evenings streaming, not searching. That’s exactly the pitch from Samsung and Perplexity: a TV-scaled experience built for quick answers, richer cards and voice interaction.

What the Perplexity TV app actually does

On Samsung’s description, the app behaves like a TV-native version of Perplexity’s web product: you can speak or type questions, and the answers appear as large, glanceable cards designed for a living room distance. The app sits inside Samsung’s Vision AI Companion and can be launched from the Apps tab or by pressing the AI Button on compatible remotes. If you use voice, you’ll need to accept terms and allow microphone access; if you’d rather not talk, there’s an on-screen keyboard and USB-keyboard support. Samsung highlights examples like planning a trip, picking movies by director, or building fantasy sports lineups — the sort of light, conversational queries that work well on a TV screen.

Perplexity’s angle — and why Samsung picked it

Perplexity started as a different-looking search product: instead of sending you a list of links, it generates concise answers that lean on real-time web sources and (ideally) transparent citations. The startup launched its answer engine in late 2022 and has since expanded into mobile assistants and other products; its growth has caught the attention of big players and investors alike. For Samsung, Perplexity is a way to broaden Vision AI with an external partner that already specializes in conversational answers rather than a generic assistant layer.

Additionally, Perplexity is offering a marketing incentive — a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription for TV users who redeem the code within the app. The promotion requires scanning the QR code that appears in the app to upgrade to Pro for a year. It’s a quick way for Perplexity to get heavy users into paid tiers while Samsung adds perceived value to its TV software.

Competition and trust

This deal lands in a noisy era for search. Google has been pushing “AI Mode” and deep assistant features into Search and Chrome, OpenAI and others are chasing browser/assistant plays, and a handful of startups are trying to reframe search from a link list to an answer-first experience. Perplexity has repeatedly been mentioned as a challenger in that conversation — partly because it focused early on generating up-to-date answers rather than summarizing stale training data. But that rise hasn’t been frictionless: Perplexity has faced questions about content sourcing and legal pushback from publishers, a complication that any distributor (including Samsung) will have to reckon with as answers move onto big screens.

So, what will change in practice?

For most people, the immediate effect will be small and pleasant: a faster way to get answers during a show or dinner conversation without pulling out a phone. For Perplexity, the Samsung deal is a distribution win — a living-room presence that could translate into engagement, subscriptions and valuable usage data. For Samsung, it’s another signal that TVs are more than passive displays; they’re becoming interactive hubs where assistants, search and streaming blur together.

The Perplexity TV app is a clear bet by both companies: Samsung wants more differentiated AI experiences on its screens, and Perplexity intends to reach. If you have a 2025 Samsung TV, you can try it now and snag a year of Pro by scanning the QR code. If you own a slightly older Samsung, keep an eye out for the promised OS update later this year. The move won’t topple Google or rewrite search overnight — but it does show how AI is moving out of phones and browsers and into the room where people actually live and argue about movies.