Here is everything Airtel users can now do with Perplexity Pro

Tired of hitting limits using ChatGPT? Or planning or getting a premium account for enhanced features? How about getting it for free! The recent announcement of Airtel (a renowned telecom provider) offering free Perplexity Pro subscription to all of its users has stirred up quite a lot of buzz. This has brought not only a lot of users to Airtel, but also drawn attention to Perplexity Pro subscription service. You might be wondering whether it is worth considering amidst the ocean of advanced LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. This article is here to assist you with that. We’ll go over what Perplexity is, its standout features, a hands-on, and how to get it for free. 

Airtel’s Offering

Airtel on July 17, 2025, announced a partnership with Perplexity to offer a 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription free of cost to all its 360million customers. This Pro subscription, worth Rs. 17,000, is now available for free, for all Airtel customers (Mobile, Wi- Fi and DTH) for one year. This marks Perplexity’s first partnership with an Indian telecom company. 

The CEO of Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, remarks:

This partnership is an exciting way to make accurate, trustworthy, and professional-grade AI accessible to more people in India—whether a student, working professional, or managing a household.

This collaboration is beneficial for Perplexity as it allows them to increase the reach of Perplexity’s AI by tapping into the user base of Airtel. Airtel, in turn, gets an attractive perk associated with its services and subscription. Effectively, creating a win-win condition for both.

What is Perplexity Pro?

Perplexity Pro is a premium subscription service offered by Perplexity AI, providing enhanced features and capabilities for users of their AI-powered search engine. Essentially, it’s a search engine that is AI-powered. The model powering Perplexity Pro is Sonar LLM, which, unlike advanced models such as Gemini 2.5, ChatGPT 4o, etc., is specifically designed for fast, real-time information retrieval. Further users can augment their experience by selecting models offered in the Perplexity Pro subscription. As of now, the models are:

• GPT-4.1: OpenAI’s advanced model focused on complex problem-solving, especially strong in coding, instruction following, and handling large context windows.
• Claude 4.0 Sonnet: Anthropic’s highly advanced language model, excelling at nuanced and accurate language tasks with a focus on both speed and depth.
• Claude 4.0 Sonnet Thinking: Anthropic’s thinking model excels at doing deep reasoning and intricate pattern recognition.
• Sonar: Flagship in-house model with a 200k context window, optimized for fast, high-quality responses with integrated web search.
• Grok 4: xAI’s latest reasoning model, excelling in complex math, science, and coding tasks.
• Gemini 2.5 Pro: Google’s multimodal generative AI, notable for advanced reasoning, coding, and handling both text and images.
• R1 (1776): Perplexity’s US-hosted, fine-tuned, uncensored model for specialized use cases.
• o3: A reasoning-focused model for complex analytical tasks, available alongside other advanced options.

The availability of models is subject to change. Refer to the official page for the complete list. 

How to Get Perplexity Pro for Free?

Here is the step-by-step procedure that you need to follow to avail the offer:

1. Open the Airtel Thanks App and log in with your Airtel mobile number.
2. Navigate to ‘Rewards and OTT.‘
3. Go to the ‘Rewards’ or ‘Rewards and OTTs’ section (it may come under a different name).
4. Look for the Perplexity Pro tile, usually highlighted as ‘AI Unlocked for you: Free Perplexity Pro worth ₹17,000.’
5. Tap the Perplexity Pro offer and select ‘Claim Now’ or similar action.
   Optional: Confirm your Airtel number if needed.

Even if you don’t own an Airtel service yourself, you can ask your friends to spare you theirs, just for the activation. 

Hands-On

To get you acquainted with the tool, I’ll test its capabilities on several tasks to determine how well it fares against its competitors. I would be demonstrating the following tasks:

1. Realtime Analytics
2. Research
3. Image Generation

Note: I’d be using Perplexity’s in-house model, Sonar, performing the following tasks. 

1. Trend Analysis Task: Explore a Real-Time Topic

Goal: Research an emerging tech or business trend, and extract insights.

Prompt: “What is the highest value gold has assumed in India, in the year 2025? Also, project its future movements.”

Response:

Assessment: The response provided was satisfactory. But the model utilizes online data sources, due to which dated information could skew its response. But still, it hit the mark and provided plausible future trends, so it is passable.

2. Deep Research Task: Explore a Topic In-depth

Goal: Research an emerging trend, and extract insights.

Prompt: “How has AI impacted Healthcare?”

Response:

Assessment: The Response was satisfactory and was presented in the format of an article. This made the information digestible and visually appealing. Albeit some infographics would have been a welcome addition.

3. Image Generation Task: Create a Complex Visual

Goal: Specify the details of an Image for its creation.

Prompt: “Create an image of a ‘Dora the Explorer’ in a realistic style, with the image dimensions being 872×872.”

Response:

Assessment: The image looks good, for a realistic Dora that is. But the model was unable to produce it within the given dimensions. So that’s a negative. 

Final Verdict

Even though the quality of the response produced by the model is acceptable, it wouldn’t be fair to assess it solely based on this, as its primary functionality relies on utilizing advanced models. For simple queries, the model performs well, but as soon as it becomes a bit nuanced (like dimension specification), it becomes hard for the model to keep up with all the requirements. Perplexity offers a plethora of established LLMs to alleviate this very problem. Attempting to closely fit the right model for the appropriate task.

Exclusive Features of Perplexity Pro

Some of you might be wondering about the features offered in the Perplexity Pro subscription. Here is a list of the key features of Perplexity Pro:

• Access to premium AI models including GPT-4.1, Claude 4.0 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 4, and Sonar Large with model switching capabilities.
• Hundreds of Pro searches per day compared to just a few on the free plan.
• Deep Research Mode that conducts automated multi-source research and generates comprehensive reports.
• Perplexity Labs for multi-step project workflows including report generation, dashboard creation, and code execution.
• Advanced file analysis with enhanced upload limits for PDFs, CSVs, images, audio, and video files.
• AI image generation using DALL-E 3 for creating custom visuals within the platform.
• $5 monthly API credits for custom integrations and workflow automation.
• Completely ad-free interface with no advertisements in search results or the app.
• Priority customer support with dedicated support channels for faster response times.
• Exclusive access to the Pro Discord community for networking with other subscribers.

Considerations while using Perplexity Pro

Here are some of the things you should consider while using this chatbot:

• High traffic might lead to latency in model responses.
• It is ill-advised to share sensitive data with the chatbots, regardless of their capabilities. 
• The model struggles creating infographics, where it’s quite common for it to strike through its own text or create ambiguous data visualizations. 

• Sometimes Perplexity hallucinates and completely skips past the user query, and gives a response it had wanted instead. The following image depicts this issue:

Other than the aforementioned pointers, there aren’t any glaring challenges that I’ve faced (or could foresee) using Perplexity Pro. 

Also Read:

• I Tried Perplexity Labs and Here’s What I Found
• Perplexity AI vs Chatgpt : Which is a Better Option?
• Perplexity Deep Research Takes on OpenAI & Gemini

Conclusion

Perplexity AI is a potent AI-powered search engine that would augment anyone using it appropriately. Its Pro plan allows access to its extended capabilities, which furthers its utility. I would encourage readers to take advantage of the offer if applicable to them, as it gets several advanced models at their disposal for free. For those who were limited to free AI chatbots, this gives them a glimpse of how well the paid or premium models perform. 

Frequently Asked Questions