DuckDuckGo developers improve AI technologies in the search engine

DuckDuckGo has big plans to incorporate AI into its search engine. The privacy-focused company announced that its search engine answer generation feature has left beta, with the algorithm now generating answers based on information from across the web, rather than just Wikipedia as it previously did. The company’s search engine will soon be complemented by an AI bot, which has also left beta.

Image source: DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo launched a feature called DuckAssist that generates answers to some search queries back in 2023. The tool provides more concise answers than Google’s AI Overviews counterpart. Users can also control how often AI-generated answers appear for queries, or turn them off entirely. Even if you choose “frequently,” AI-generated answers will only appear 20% of the time, though the company plans to increase the frequency over time.

«”We would like to increase this number in the future. This is another important area that we are working in. We intend to remain conservative in this regard. We would not like to put this out there in public view if we think it is wrong,” said DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg.

Some of the search queries DuckDuckGo generates include a field that lets you ask new questions and start a conversation with the Duck.ai chatbot. You don’t need to register an account to interact with the company’s AI bot, which lets you switch between different language models, including GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, and Claude 3 Haiku. The benefit is that you can interact with each language model anonymously, hiding your IP address. DuckDuckGo has also partnered with the AI ​​bot developer for each language model to ensure that user data is not used to train the neural networks.

Despite this, Duck.ai can store user chat history, but this data remains on the local device, not on the company’s servers. In the next few weeks, Duck.ai will add support for web search, which will expand the bot’s ability to generate answers to user questions. The company is working on implementing voice command support for Android and iOS. The developers also plan to add the ability for the bot to process images.

Duck.ai will remain free, but access to more advanced language models will be available through a paid subscription for $10 per month. DuckDuckGo has no plans to join OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others in releasing the chatbot as a standalone app.