Every day more services integrate artificial intelligence as part of their functions. Yesterday it was the case for Slack, while today the protagonist is the private search engine DuckDuckGo and its DuckAssist. The latter uses the technology of ChatGPT and Anthropic to drive itself, although it works differently.
Unlike ChatGPT, DuckDuckGo does not present us with a chatbot, standing out from competitors like Google or Bing. Instead, it is an addition to the Instant Replies features that the service already had. The difference is that, Using the power of OpenAI’s language generation technology, DuckAssist is able to deliver concise answers without the user having to investigate the entire web.
How does DuckAssist work? Once the artificial intelligence recognizes a term that it can answer, it will suggest an automatic response about it. When this happens, you will see a magic wand appear next to the Question button. Of course, as it is still in beta, the company warns that the assistant may not appear in all the searches you do.
Currently, the company has limited the source of DuckAssist information to Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica —although the latter to a lesser extent. As they comment, this should help the artificial intelligence model not show erratic behavior, as has been seen in Microsoft’s Bard or Bing.
DuckAssist, the artificial intelligence of DuckDuckGo that is inspired by ChatGPT
One of the examples that DuckDuckGo allows us to see about this assistant inspired by ChatGPT is performing the search for “What color is” the dress “?, making clear reference to the controversy of the famous white dress with gold, or blue with black. Within seconds, DuckAssist replies that “the dress is black and blue with a lace pattern. Roman Originals produced a unique version of the dress in white and gold as part of a charity campaign.” So, artificial intelligence settles the matter once and for allwithout the need for the user to open any links.
Besides, DuckAssist’s AI is reported to be better on questions with a specific answer, such as the capital of a country, than with others of a qualitative nature. For example, what is the best movie of Avengers?-.
“DuckAssist is a new type of instant response in our search results, just like News, Maps, Weather and many others that we already have,” says Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo in the post where they present artificial intelligence.
We’ve designed DuckAssist to be fully integrated into DuckDuckGo Private Search, mirroring the look and feel of our traditional search results, so while the AI-generated content is new, we hope that using DuckAssist will feel like something new. natural.
Gabriel Weinberg.
On the other hand, Weinberg assures that this artificial intelligence is not free of errors. “There is a limit to the amount of information that the function can summarize,” she says. “Inaccuracies can occur if our relevance feature is not working, inadvertently omitting key phrases, or if there is an underlying error in the given source material.”
DuckAssist training is completely anonymous. Unlike the other search engines, DuckDuckGo does not use its users’ searches to train the modeland also does not share personally identifiable information with third parties.
When will this new AI be available?
While the DuckAssist beta is already available, the company plans to roll it out to all users in the coming weeks, if everything goes fine. For its part, DuckDuckGo seems to have plans to continue adding functions based on artificial intelligence to its browser.
If you do not want DuckAssist to appear during your searches, you always have the option to turn it off. Unfortunately, you will have to disable all Instant Replies. You can do this from the service search settings.
The DuckAssist beta is only available in English, at least for now. Yes indeed, you can enjoy it in the DuckDuckGo applications for Mac, iOS or Android, as well as the browser extension for Chrome, Safari and Firefox.