DuckDuckGo Is Also Trying AI Summaries, but in a Less Annoying Way

DuckDuckGo is not everyone’s first option, but a lot of people like it because it puts a focus on privacy and because it’s otherwise pretty lightweight and straightforward to use. DuckDuckGo is also widely rollout out AI summaries of search pages, although you might like these better than Google’s.

DuckDuckGo has announced that it’s moving its AI summaries out of beta and expanding their capabilities. DuckDuckGo’s AI-generated answers, initially launched in 2023 under the name “DuckAssist,” now draw information from a broader range of web sources beyond Wikipedia. They are meant to be a less intrusive alternative to similar AI overview features found in other search engines. Whether that’s completely true is up to what you think, but they certainly look way better than whatever Google is doing these days.

DuckDuckGo is putting a lot of focus on making this as user-customizable as possible. You can adjust the frequency with which these AI-generated answers appear, including turning them off completely. Even if you set them to the “often” setting, these summaries are currently displayed for only about 20 percent of searches, though DuckDuckGo plans to increase this gradually. The AI-generated summaries also clearly display the websites used as sources. Some summaries include a box for follow-up questions—if you do use that, you’ll be moved to DuckDuckGo’s AI chatbot, Duck.ai.

And talking about Duck.ai, the company’s standalone chatbot has also exited beta, so you have one extra chatbot alternative to check out. Like the search summaries and, frankly, the whole browser, Duck.ai tries to be built around privacy. You don’t need an account to use the service, and DuckDuckGo emphasizes that user data is not used for training the AI models. The chatbot offers the ability to switch between various underlying AI models, including GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, and Claude 3 Haiku. We’ve seen this from a few chatbots out there, but we’re glad to see it in one where privacy is such a priority. DuckDuckGo has secured agreements with the companies providing these models to ensure user data privacy.

A new “Recent Chats” feature has been introduced to Duck.ai, storing conversation history locally on the user’s device rather than on DuckDuckGo’s servers. And work is not stopping there. In the coming weeks, DuckDuckGo plans to integrate web search capabilities directly into the chatbot. This will likely significantly improve its ability to answer a wider range of queries, particularly those requiring up-to-date information. Other planned features include making it multimodal, adding voice interaction on iPhone and Android devices, and the ability to upload images and ask questions about them.

CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirmed that Duck.ai will remain free to use. However, the company is considering offering access to more advanced AI models as part of its existing $9.99 per month subscription service, which currently includes features like VPN and identity theft protection. For now, though, they’re free, so you might want to take advantage of them. He also said that unlike some of its competitors, DuckDuckGo is not planning to release a separate dedicated app for its chatbot—the search and chat experiences should remain one for the most part, and it might look kind of similar to what Microsoft Copilot, then Bing Chat, looked like at launch.

The new AI improvements, including the new AI summaries and the new chatbot, should be available through the DuckDuckGo website.

Source: DuckDuckGo