You Can Try DuckDuckGo AI Search Right Now
Everyone wants to do business with AI these days, and for good reason. AI programs and services are attracting millions of active users and dominating headlines. ChatGPT alone hit 100 million active users in two months. The latest players in the field of artificial intelligence are search engines who want to turn traditional Google into educational conversations with artificial intelligence. DuckDuckGo takes a slightly different approach, injecting AI into search without chat, instead offering users clear and concise answers to their queries.
The search company is calling its new product ” DuckAssist “, based on natural language technology from OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT) and Anthropic. Unlike sophisticated and sophisticated chatbots like Microsoft’s Bing or Google’s upcoming Bard, DuckAssist doesn’t offer deeper learning through human-like conversations. Instead, this function just fires whenever you do a search that Wikipedia could reasonably answer. When this happens, you will see DuckAssist with a blue “Ask” button: select it and the AI will try to give you a clear answer to your request.
This works because DuckAssist actually pulls data from Wikipedia (and sometimes Britannica as well), and why not: if the AI can find the answer to your question in a series of cited articles in the free encyclopedia, it will save you the trouble of having to Wikipedia yourself , as well as browsing articles based on the same Wikipedia articles found by DuckAssist. Also, as noted by Gizmodo’s Thomas Germain , limiting information to these sources minimizes problems that other AI programs have experienced, including “hallucinations” and other bizarre behavior .
Due to the way it is currently set up, expect better results from simple fact-based questions rather than subjective questions for which the AI would have to formulate an argument. DuckDuckGo offers questions like “what is a search engine index” rather than “what is the best search engine?” It’s good that they don’t automatically say “DuckDuckGo, of course!” In any case, all DuckAssist responses will include the source so you can see where it’s getting its information from.
Like other AI models, DuckAssist is not actively connected to the internet. Rather, it is an extract from a downloaded database of Wikipedia articles. DuckDuckGo says this database is “no more than a few weeks old,” so don’t expect it to provide answers to questions that require fresher context than early February 2023.
However, the best thing about DuckAssist is that it is available to everyone right now. Microsoft keeps the Bing AI chatbot on a waiting list , while Google’s Bard is available to a limited number of software testers. Right now, though, you can find the beta version of DuckAssist in the iOS, Android, and Mac versions of the DuckDuckGo app, as well as the DuckDuckGo extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It’s not yet available on the standard DuckDuckGo search, but today there are plenty of ways to try it.
If you use these DuckDuckGo forms, DuckAssist will be enabled by default. You can disable DuckAssist, but only by disabling “Instant Replies” in the settings, which, as you might expect, will disable Instant Replies in addition to DuckAssist.