DuckDuckGo Launches Its Own AI-Tool ‘DuckAssist’ – SlashGear

DuckDuckGo’s announcement comes with a prediction for the future. The company says, “DuckAssist is the first in a series of AI-assisted private search and browser updates,” and it’s free and available to try today. DuckAssist isn’t like other generative AI resources. Instead of asking the AI to produce a response to a question, DuckAssist will summarize information and provide a synopsis of the data. The source material for the tool will primarily come from Wikipedia and Brittanica. 

This means that DuckAssist won’t be free from error, but the AI is expected to “hallucinate” far less often than other systems, according to DuckDuckGo. This means you can assume the answer is probably correct, provided the source material is factual and the question isn’t too convoluted. DuckAssist won’t simply make up responses.

DuckDuckGo’s beta phase of the tool’s rollout will include an anonymous feedback feature to improve the accuracy of resulting DuckAssist answers. The company also notes that it won’t share personal data with its “search content partners,” OpenAI and Anthropic, so this new integration will not affect user anonymity. DuckDuckGo also indicates that not all search queries will return a DuckAssist response. Questions with subjective language (i.e., ‘what’s the best muscle car?’) aren’t well suited to the AI’s mission. Simple queries like ‘what is a muscle car?’ will likely return contextualizing content to help streamline users’ search experiences.