Not to sound snarky but Anthropic introduced function calling over a year ago... The capability was always there for someone that wanted to spend a weekend coding a tool for it.
I agree. I have been integrating Brave search and DuckDuckGo search with LLMs for about a year. That said it is so much more convenient having an option of having it built in.
I stopped paying for Perplexity a year ago, but a month ago I started using Perplexity's combined search+LLM APIs - reasonably priced and convenient.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-family?_hsenc=p2ANqt...