We don’t save or share your search or browsing history when you search on DuckDuckGo or use our browsing apps or browser extensions, and searches with DuckAssist are no exception. It’s a fully integrated part of DuckDuckGo Private Search, which is also free and anonymous. “DuckAssist is anonymous, with no logging in required. We wanted DuckAssist to be the first because we think it can immediately help users find answers to what they are looking for faster,” DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg explained in a blog post announcing the feature. “This is the first in a series of generative AI-assisted features we hope to roll out in the coming months. Users can also turn it off by disabling the instant answers feature in the search settings. The company is scheduling a universal release over the next few weeks, assuming no major problems crop up during the testing phase. DuckAssist is embedded in all of DuckDuckGo’s apps and browser extensions in English, but the feature is still in beta. OpenAI and Anthropic both provide the natural language technology needed to digest and summarize the answers. DuckAssist pulls from the most recent full Wikipedia download, released last month.

The feature kicks in when an answer can be formulated from Wikipedia articles in almost all cases, though encyclopedic sources like Britannica are sometimes consulted. As seen in the gif above, generative AI is used to compose a paragraph or two directly answering the question. Generative DuckAssistĭuckAsist appears in response to a search query along with the standard list of links, serving to enhance the existing Instant Answers feature. The company wants to offer the benefits of generative AI while staying true to its philosophy of privacy-centered search. The new DuckAssist tool summarizes relevant parts of Wikipedia articles to provide answers and doesn’t engage in conversation with the user like Microsoft’s new Bing AI chatbot or what previews of Google’s Bard have promised.

DuckDuckGo released a new generative AI feature to answer search queries without leaving the search engine’s website.

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