Inside DuckDuckGo

In this episode, Cristina (CMO) and Zack (Senior Director, Marketing) discuss our new Duck.ai ad, how we develop, test, and measure creative and campaigns, and why we do a lot of the work in-house.
Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com.
Cristina: Hi, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Hi, I’m Cristina. I’m on the marketing team, and I’m here today with Zack. Do you want to introduce yourself?
Zack: Yeah, my name is Zack Einhorn. I’m on the marketing team as well at DuckDuckGo and been here for nine years now. and I live in LA. Happy to be here.
Cristina: Happy to have you, thanks for joining. So today we’re gonna talk about our new ad campaign. On June 29th, we launched Prying Eyes, the name of our first national brand campaign for Duck.ai. And for those of you who don’t know what Duck.ai is, it is a way to chat privately with ChatGPT and other AIs, all in one place for free, no login. So today we’re gonna go behind the scenes, how it came together. Our unique development and production process, our views on AI, and more. Before we jump in, I just want to say to everyone listening: love it, hate it, have ideas for a new episode, please write us at podcast@duckduckgo.com. That’s podcast@duckduckgo.com. We will read all of them and would appreciate any feedback. So, first question: Zack, why why a brand campaign for Duck.ai and why now?
Zack: Yeah, well, you know, for years we had been focused on you know performance marketing for as an alternative to Google and Chrome and focusing on search and browse. And we’re introducing a new product market that has virtually zero awareness. And we’re really confident about the product market fit. We know that there’s a lot of built-up anxiety around AI and a desire for private alternatives. And so we know it’s time to let people know that one exists and from a company that you trust and have been trusting.
Cristina: So I find that when I chat with people about what I do, they think the the making the ad portion of my work is the most interesting, right? And they’ll ask, like what is it like to be on set and all these kind of things? So I think a lot of people find that industry but interesting. But even for industry veterans, it’s maybe interesting to hear about how we at DuckDuckGo make an ad, because it’s a different bit different than how most companies do it. Can you dive into that?
Zack: Yeah, absolutely. so you know, most companies, and in my in my experience, the prior companies, you know, they kind of hand everything over to one agency. You know, everything is sort of with one big house strategy, research, testing. and the way that we do it is a little bit different. Like you said, we’re we tend to we like to be really hands on. and I think, you know, one thing that makes us pretty different too is that, you know, we’re we you know we’re some of like the foremost researchers on this space at the company. And so we you know, whereas it might be really useful if you’re in like a you know a a a category, like you know, consumer package goods, to have like the expertise of an agency that may have many, many clients in that space and can and can, you know, give you strategy and insight into areas that you may not have. but because we really you know, we have a lot of that research and talent in house, the strategy really you know comes from us. and you know, we tend to lean on agencies more for like additional initial ideation. and then from there we really take things into our own hands. We have we have freelancers that we’ve gone back to a handful of times to help us develop ideas. We’ve got internal talent that helps us develop ideas. and then we have production companies that we work directly with. And that I think is a real for us. You know, we we save a lot of, I think, you know, we save a lot of time in the game of telephone that you usually play with your with your agency by being able to, you know, handpick the director, be you know deeply involved in the post-production, like attending edit sessions, coloring. and I think that that gives us a advantage because you know not only do we get to accelerate by making those being hands-on in those choices, but we also continuously build those skill sets. And so you know we’ve been doing it now, we’ve been doing it this way and kind of building on that process for five years now. And we’ve just we’ve built up a a a ton of expertise internally and done a lot of hot like you know, a lot of good hiring to fill the the areas of expertise that we didn’t have, expanded our network of partners. yeah, we’ve really kind of built up this this in-house team.
Cristina: Yeah, thanks for walking us through that. So internally, the team has been calling this ad Prying Eyes. Like, what does that mean? Where did the idea come from?
Zack: Yeah, absolutely. So it came from one of our one of our agency partners. You know, we we’d we went through a process where you know we realized one of the things that we weren’t super strong at internally was coming up with the initial idea. and so we ran through a process where we worked with a series of agencies and freelancers to to come up with ideas. One of them came up with this idea that was really sticking with us where we had you know giant photorealistic eyeballs following you know c following people and and you know in you know invading their space when they’re doing asking AI sensitive questions. And we had a few directions we were looking at, and we had done a bunch of research. And the thing that we kept coming back to was this thing we called exposure anxiety. And the crux of it was that we realized that when we got a level down into the specific things that people were worried about being spied on. you know, giving away when they’re when they’re using AI, that it became like a bit polarizing. Like, you know, they once you used a specific example, people are like, well that’s not quite really me. But we found the thing that really stuck for everyone, and that was the most visceral thing, which I think is the most important because I think that’s what sticks with you it emotionally in an ad and will make you think of it later and motivate you, was just the actual sensation of of being watched. That was the through line that whether you were worried about, you know, asking AI about something related to, you know, health, or whether you were asking about an issue going on at work, or you know, whether you’re asking AI you know for symptoms of, you know, something that your that your kids dealing with, that that no matter what it was, everyone shared this this this feeling of exposure anxiety and you know what what can make you you know what is more exposing than feeling like there are giant eyes behind you watching everything that you that you type.
Cristina: Yeah, this was this was a fun concept. you know, we considered a lot of different ideas, and for me, just seeing and thinking about the eyeballs was just so arresting, right? In a really clear visual way to encompass the feelings that we had heard in research, right? We’re a very data-driven company, and so research is really important to us. We’re not just thinking of something that looks cool, it needs to be grounded in an insight that we think relates back to the problem we’re trying to solve.
Zack: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also just there was a lot of connectivity to to like our overall message, too, like, you know, in in terms of of privacy and and and prior campaigns. I think that we, when we went in, I think we really thought we want something that is uniquely AI. but I think what we found is that a lot of the anxiety around AI is kind of an evolution of the of the anxiety that already existed. So just like the way, just the way that AI is the newest way that people are are using the internet and and how it’s you know it’s more personalized and you know tailored than than than search and browse was it’s also that much more viscerally you know uncomfortable you know you’re you’re a lot more you know, likely to have sort of these uncanny experiences where, you know, AI will bring up a prior conversation or mention a tidbit that you thought, you know, wasn’t being logged, you know. and and so I think it really helped draw that draw that through line.
Cristina: Yeah. Yeah, I I personally feel very passionate that if someone is going to use AI, they should use Duck.ai because it’s hard to anticipate just how this data will be used from other companies in the future. But I think we can all anticipate, probably not in a great way, right? In terms of privacy. On the last episode I was on, we talked about how not everybody wants AI, right? And that’s why we feel so strongly about making it optional. So how do you think about making an ad for AI?
Zack: Yeah, I mean I think that’s a very real subset of people. I look at, you know, the way that I look at DuckDuckGo’s mission is, you know, I think we, you know, I look at the goal of DuckDuckGo to provide for people the the best quality possible version of the internet that you are used to using, but private. And so I think, you know, that is the that is the the the mass of people that we saw that that we that we serve. AI adoption is, you know, well over fifty percent and growing. And so I think you know it’s really important that we serve that audience. at the same time, you know, we firmly, while while we believe, you know, in providing the pro in private AI, we also, you know, we also take exception to the way that AI is being sort of jammed down people’s throat by other by other companies. and you know, we take pride and we think it, I think I we think it’s you know goes along with our overall mission of build of raising the standard of trust online. to give people the ability to control AI and use it on their own on their own terms. And so even in our in even in our our advertising of our AI products, we’re very clear you know in in our messaging, like for example, the television ad in our end card and VO to say that you know Duck.ai is is from DuckDuckGo and that our our policy here is that AI is private and optional. And so we you know we want to be clear that that is all you know that is our brand’s stance.
Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re spending all this money on TV and digital and all these channels. How do we know if it works? Like what what are we trying to achieve here and what are those signals?
Zack: Yeah, I mean it is, you know, raising brand awareness is meaningfully harder to read than than you know performance performance marketing. and it takes time. you know, we we I think the bottom line is we won’t know, we won’t know right away. the what we’ve seen from the initial tests is you know, we we’re able to get a read on awareness on a two to three month kind of timeline to see if we’re moving that. usage usually lags behind that. and so I think, you know, a lot of times when you’re when you’re looking at awareness, I think what you’re looking at is is, you know, you have you have immediate you know you have immediate key performance indicators which for us are all are all centered around awareness you know we’re doing pulse checks for every four weeks we’re we’re revisiting a survey and we’re seeing if we’ve if we’ve raised it. and then in terms of driving actual growth, I think it’s really more of a higher level question of running that strategy for long enough to be able to create the the flywheel and seeing how it impacts growth holistically. And so I think that is something that’s probably on a longer you know, timeline closer to, you know, six months to a year where you can really see the the big impact of focusing on on brand awareness. And that’s that is similar to what we saw you know, several years ago when we were doing big brand awareness push for the core product.
Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a bit of a patience game, right? Wait waiting to see if these metrics go up and maybe leaning on some early indicators, but it’s not that instant gratification that you get from a direct response camp.
Zack: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We are looking at the direct response metrics on but but trying to set expectations that that you know we’re in a we’re in a teach people our name place.
Cristina: Yeah. So so you and the team have been working hard on this for months. Maybe you get to take a little bit of a break now while, you know, the big channels are out there and you’re waiting for some of the data to come in, but I’m sure that’s not all. So do you want to speak to what’s next?
Zack: Yeah, I mean I think you know, not really taking a break. trying to, you know, I think we had real we have really you know, ambitious goals for this campaign. I think, you know, we we’re we are ramping up in all senses of the word. You know, we’re starting out with we’re starting out heavily in a in a in a handful of channels, very, very video centric, you know, CTV, YouTube, and and social, but we’re really looking to build out the 360 of the campaign. We’re looking at a handful of other channels inclusive of out of home and audio and looking to expand overall coverage pr we’ve got we’ve got a bunch of a bunch of stuff deck to to help fill out this campaign and and bring it to life on a larger scale.
Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. I’m very excited that this is finally out there now and working to not only teach people the name, but hopefully get people using it. So again, if you haven’t yet, try Duck.ai. Again, it’s free, no login required. So if you want to do an AI search, but you want to do more privately, give it a go. Zack, it was really great chatting with you today and kind of reliving the work of the last few months. Thank you and the team for all of your hard work. and again, very exciting that the ads are out there now.
Zack: Mm-hmm. Thank you. Appreciate you having me. I’m very excited.
Cristina: Alrighty. Yeah. Okay, well that’s all for now and stay tuned for future episodes of Duck Tales. See you later.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

In this episode, Peter (Product) and Dave (Privacy) discuss YouTube Ad Blocking, why we built it, how it works, and how it differs from Duck Player.
Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com.
Show notes: Ad Blocking is enabled by default for Mac, iOS and Windows browsers. It will be enabled by default for Android soon, but for now can be turned on in settings.
Peter: Hello everyone and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo, we discuss the stories, technology, and the people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each of these episodes, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or things like approaches to AI. My name is Peter. I’m on the product team at DuckDuckGo, and I’m joined with my colleague Dave. Dave, do you want to introduce yourself?
Dave: Sure. Yeah. Hey, I’m Dave. I generally work on the browser experience at DuckDuckGo. That means working on privacy protections, working on making sure that websites work the way that you expect them to work and yeah, making sure that you have a good experience browsing the web.
Peter: Awesome. And today we’re gonna be talking about ad blocking, more specifically YouTube ad blocking, but I think we’re gonna talk also just generally about about ad blocking. So Dave, why don’t we why don’t we start at the top? Does DuckDuckGo browser block ads today?
Dave: If if you’ve used one of our browsers, you’ve probably noticed that you see quite a few fewer ads. So that’s a side effect of our tracker blocking. So the reason that you’re seeing fewer ads is a lot of these ads come with trackers, you know. They want to see how you interact with the ad. They want more info about you to determine, you know, is that like a a good impression? And you know, they want to build these profiles and all of that. So we block those requests before they’re initiated. And that leads to many fewer ads across the web. But we don’t deploy a like a specific ad blocking feature.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Got it. And so we what what you’re basically saying is a lot of these companies that, you know, serve up advertising are also tracking the heck out of people. And so by by virtue of the fact that we block that tracking, we are basically blocking you know a lot of the advertisements on the internet.
Dave: That’s right. That’s right.
Peter: Makes sense. And so what’s changing about our ad blocking?
Dave: Yeah, so what we’re doing here, and as Peter said, we we’re starting with YouTube. We r have received a ton of user feedback asking for us to do something about this. As as you probably know, YouTube shows up to you know several minutes of ads before videos, during videos, just constantly. And what what’s changing here is we have deployed we’re working on deploying a feature that will just prevent these ads from loading. So instead of, you know, waiting thirty to seconds to a minute before you can watch a video and then getting interrupted in the middle of a video, you should be able to watch the video right away and without interruptions.
Peter: Yeah, and so a a lot of you’re saying a lot of our users have been asking for the ability to block ads on on YouTube. I think it’s safe to say that, you know, a lot of DuckDuckGo search users who historically have used other browsers, have have used extensions, ad block extensions to get this benefit. And so Dave, you’re saying a lot of these users have asked us for the similar sort of capability in our browsers.
Dave: Yeah, that’s right. Extensions are a very powerful tool. We don’t export extensions in our browsers for for good reason. So they can be a blessing and a curse. If if you’re using the right extensions, there are safe extensions and they can improve your browsing experience by like you know blocking ads or you know auto-filling password fields, that kind of stuff. But they’re also a a really large risk because there are a lot of malicious extensions out there and unscrupulous extensions out there that can you know get full access to everything within the web pages that you’re looking at and exfiltrate your data and track what you’re doing online without you even realizing.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Yeah, I I remember over the last few years, every few months there seems to be a story about some extension that that a lot of people installed that either went rogue or maybe got sold to another company and then they use that extension to to data mine people and spy on their their online browsing behavior overall. And so you’re you’re basically saying, Dave, by adding this capability, the YouTube ad blocking natively to our browser applications. Not only is it easy for our users to enable and get that benefit, but it is also safe to do so. Is that right?
Dave: That’s exactly right.
Peter: Awesome. Cool. And so we built this based on user demand. But a lot of our browser users already have the benefit of something we call Duck Player. Can you explain what Duck Player is and then let’s talk about how Duck Player differs from the YouTube ad blocking that we’re talking about?
Dave: Yeah, totally. So Duck Player, we like to think about it as kind of a theater mode. So if you visit YouTube or you load a YouTube link, you can load it in this kind of standalone window within our browsers that we call Duck Player. And what what’s happening there is we’re loading it through this separate YouTube no cookie domain. And and the advantage of what we’re doing there is that it doesn’t like when you watch videos, they’re they’re not tied to your account and it they won’t influence your viewing history or your, you know, recommended videos. But over time we’ve we’ve seen quite a bit of feedback from users about issues that they’ve run into with Duck Player and that that have made them go back and watch videos on YouTube’s main page. So I can go into this a a little bit here. So quite often, I guess all the time, when when a when a content creator uploads a video to YouTube, they can decide whether they want that video to be viewable on YouTube or whether they want it to be able to be embedded on other sites. So if they say, no, we don’t want this to be embedded on other sites, that makes it so it also can’t be watched in Duck Player. And there are a couple other edge cases here that prevent users from watching videos in in Duck Player. So if there’s an age restriction on a video that you have to sign in to your YouTube account in order to watch the video, that means you also can’t watch it there. And you know th they’re there a variety of issues that we’ve run into or heard from heard about from users.
Peter: That makes sense. Yeah, I I think I think it’s safe to say that our our users love Duck Player. A. We we’ve heard from a lot of users that it’s it’s a killer feature that they they use all the time. But as as you said, yeah, between people who do want sometimes they want to see the full full comments and things like that that you’re not gonna get in Duck Player, they want to see those on YouTube, but they also want to benefit from the the ad free experience. That’s part of the reason we built the YouTube ad blocking and to to avoid some of the error messages that you referred to, which tend to come up pretty often, particularly on on desktop browsers, the error where video cannot be watched because a content creator disallowed it from being watched outside of YouTube. It comes up a couple percent of the time overall. So with this new YouTube ad blocking, it should be a little bit more seamless for everybody. Cool.
Dave: Yeah, and I I just want to make it clear that Duck Player’s not going anywhere. That that still exists. You can still choose to use it. We’re just creating more optionality here.
Peter: Awesome. And and that means that anyone who’s currently setting Duck Player to always load videos in Duck Player, they should continue to have that experience as their default, right?
Dave: That’s right.
Peter: That’s great. Talk talk a little bit about building out the YouTube ad blocking capabilities. What what were any main challenges we hit along the way?
Dave: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so as you know, we have a we have a browser on four different platforms, Android, iOS, Mac OS, and Windows. Slightly different architecture on each platform. Websites literally differently between, you know, they they often have like a mobile version and a desktop version. So it can be a challenge to ship parity across all all platforms. I think the the trickiest part about building ad blocking for YouTube is it’s it’s not just a simple block this request and ads won’t load. I think you know YouTube and other large websites are incentivized to prevent users from ad from blocking their ads, which means they make it a a little bit more challenging to work around that. So what we’re doing here is, you know, we we are blocking a few requests, but we’re also injecting several different scripts into the page that kind of you know rearrange how the ad calls load into the videos.
Peter: Hmm. And and if if you our users who are using the new capability, if they if they see issues come up through their use of it, is there a way that they can tell us about that?
Dave: Yeah, that’s a good point. Absolutely. Please, if you run into any issues using this new feature, you can either submit browser feedback, which is through through the settings page. We also offer a more direct way to submit feedback about a problem you’re experiencing with a specific site. We call it a a broken site report. You can access that through the privacy dashboard, which can be found by clicking the the little shield icon in the address bar. And if you just fill that out, our team does read these reports and we we try to we we do everything we can to respond to them as quickly as possible.
Peter: Awesome. I think it’s also fair to say that our team at DuckDuckGo is pretty active on Reddit, particularly the DuckDuckGo subreddit. And so if you prefer, if you want to post something there about your experience, by all means, we we will we will engage with you. We’d love to hear you know the direct feedback and and and sometimes help troubleshoot. And that that goes both ways. We certainly like to help people if they run into any issues, and that helps us understand if there are some issues on particular machines that we may not be seeing internally and helps us chase those issues down overall. Awesome. Dave, what’s t tell us a little bit about when people can expect to see this.
Dave: Yeah, so as we record this, it’s currently rolling out to each of our platforms. By the time that you are watching or listening to this, you should be able to access it on all four of our platforms. If you you know, we’re we’re enabling it by default for users, and you can also go into settings and check there’s a new there should be a new ad blocking menu item there, and you can, you know, make sure that it’s enabled or disable it if you don’t want it, if you like ads.
Peter: Cool. Well I hope all of our users are ex as excited about this feature as we are, those of us the internally that built it out. And like we said, we’re always eager to hear feedback if you have any. And with that, Dave, thank you for joining me on this Duck Tales episode. See y’all next time.
Dave: Thanks, Peter.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Aitor (Engineering) discuss AI in the DuckDuckGo browser, including how we’re integrating Duck.ai, our private AI chat. Plus, why it’s important we make AI not just easy to access, but easy to dial down or turn off entirely.
Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com
Beah: Hello, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, the technology, and the people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Today you’re going to hear about our approach to AI in the browser at DuckDuckGo. So we have—we have four browsers. Or we have a browser for four platforms, Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. And I have with me to talk about this topic today about how we have integrated AI into those browsers, Aitor. Aitor, would you like to introduce yourself briefly?
Aitor: Sure. Yeah, so my name is Aitor. I’m originally Spanish, currently living in Portugal. Been in DuckDuckGo for, I don’t know, five years, something like that. I don’t remember anymore. Started as an—as an Android engineer and now I’m leading with other folks what we call the objective for our AI browser integrations, which is what Beah just presented.
Beah: Yep. Awesome. And yes, if—if we—if you haven’t met me before, I’m Beah, I’m on the product team at DuckDuckGo. Before we jump in, I have a bunch of questions for Aitor. But before we jump into the questions, I just want to say this is a PSA to the audience. We’ve been running Duck Tales for, I think, a bit over six months now, and have a pretty good following on Substack, and we’d love to hear from the listeners more.
Aitor: Okay.
Beah: So if you have feedback about what you like, what you don’t like, what topics you’d like to hear more about, send us a note at podcast@duckduckgo.com with your feedback. We’ll also put that address in the show notes. But please, we’d really love to hear from you. So okay, with that said, maybe just a quick kind of introduction to how we’re approaching AI in general at DuckDuckGo before we get into the—the details of how we put it into the—the browser. Since we started adding AI features to our products, we’ve had this like three-prong value system that AI be private, useful, and optional. So I think those are like—private’s probably pretty self-explanatory if you’re listening to this podcast anyway. Useful meaning like not AI for AI’s sake, but actually like solving a meaningful problem for users. And then optional is also maybe deserves a little explanation. Like you can turn AI off in all of our products. So you know there’s an incredible spectrum of opinions about AI and when to use it and how much to use it that ranges from never to all the time and everywhere in between. And we put a lot of care into giving users the like toggles and controls they need to customize their level of interaction with AI. Whatever you choose there, it will always be private. So that’s like a—just a little bit of groundwork. But Aitor, can you tell me a little bit about like how that—how we’ve integrated AI into the browsers and maybe a demo would be in order too.
Aitor: Yeah, let’s just do—let’s just try to share—this is where everything goes wrong now. Let’s just try to say how our AI integration looks like in production right now. Let me share my phone. Okay, so can you—can you see that?
Beah: Sure. It can.
Aitor: So this is how people would basically see our browser whenever they—they open it. In here you have like some favorites. It’s just for—for display. So the way that we’ve integrated AI in the browser right now is through this toggle, as we call it internally. You see above—search and Duck.ai. What we want is to give like a very quick access to search, a very quick access to Duck.ai, and—and a very easy switch between them. So in here, users could start a search or a browse. Similarly they can just switch the toggle or flip the toggle to the other side and they would see basically our integration with chats. You see here there is a bunch of chats, different icons to show whether it’s a voice chat or a text chat. We also want to have this marriage between chats and—and browsing and we’ll get—probably a little bit more into details later. So at the bottom, if you didn’t want to chat, you have like an easy access again to browser—to search. You can access one chat right from here. Then basically we display our Duck.ai chat. And from here you can just continue chatting from here. This is in Spanish, sorry, or you can just access—or your history or you can create a new one. So this is basically how—
Beah: That looks like a testing history if ever I’ve seen one.
Aitor: Yeah. So this is basically how—how it looks like in production. It will change very, very soon. So we are gonna ship like a—this is like a good experience, but we are gonna improve it like even further. And yeah, in here related to privacy, like you can just like delete your chats for good, you can rename it and this is like our fire button, which if you are a user you should know about it. The context of—of a chat, you can just basically delete a chat and discuss with our privacy story as well. So this is like a very—
Beah: Yeah, I love that. I love the chat level delete. Like I—like I don’t—I don’t use the app level fire button hardly ever ‘cause like I want some amount of memory, but I have like a bunch of like quick throwaway chats like all the time and it’s so satisfying to get them out of my like history list, yeah. Yeah. Hey, you mind going back to the toggle—sorry, Aitor.
Aitor: Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Yeah, I’m also like a heavy user of this one. Yeah, cool. No, no, I—I was saying that I’m—I’m kinda like the same user. Like I don’t generally use the button to just clear everything. I’m more surgical. So I love the fact that—that this is the integration and experience that we have—that we’ve created for chats.
Beah: Yeah. Do you mind going back to the toggle view? I just wanted to like the search or Duck.ai input. So like when you were—yeah, if you go to the Duck.ai side, just to be totally clear, like those are historical chats. So we—so the auto complete is filling—like if you wanted to revisit a chat and if you start typing it’ll filter. So if you have like a very long history list, it’s an easy way to get to—yeah.
Aitor: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. This is the chat history—similar to—it resembles basically the experience of search, although it’s like slightly different. It’s only about chats. And—and yes, as soon as you start typing, it starts autocompleting the ones that they are more relevant to—to your—to your—to your text. There’s a bunch of—of things that we are doing around improving the—the—the searching capabilities. So that it’s not only by title, but it’s like—I don’t know, if you don’t quite remember the exact words of your chat, basically we still wanna present with that option, right? So there’s like a bunch of work as well going on in that direction.
Beah: Yeah, it’s interesting. Like it—well, I think one of the s—central product challenges here is like chat is not entirely analogous to search or browse in that you—you know, you pro—you don’t want to like continue a search. I mean you might like branch off from a search, but like what—you know, an old search is an old search. A chat you might want to like revisit a chat to continue. It’s like a living thing that you wanna continue. And so that’s created some interesting, like—we’re—we’re sort of trying to make these parallel worlds that will feel familiar to some extent.
Aitor: That’s fine. Exactly.
Beah: Good thing. I can’t read Portuguese, huh? Or Spanish. Okay, no. I saw the heart though, that was nice. Yeah. We can edit that out and post if you want. Very good. Good, ‘cause I like it. Yeah. Cool. Do you mind—Aitor, there’s like another—do you want to just show the sort of—if you’re on a website, like how to—how to start a search or a chat?
Aitor: I know, that’s totally fine. Set, live demo, if things happen. Yeah, so if we go to like a—a website, in here what—what the users can do to quickly go into—into chat is there is this little CTA, this little icon here where users just can tap it and this pops up this sheet that allows the user to chat with the context of—chat about the context of—of the page that they are browsing if they want to. This is what this means basically here. This means that the context of this particular page is attached. You see like BBC Home, that card in there. User can remove it if they just want to chat about something generic that doesn’t really have to do with—with a page. And you can reattach it if you want. And then we have like quick accesses here that says summarize this page. So if the user clicks on it and then submits, you should just get like a summary of—of the page that you were browsing. So this is the Gombia.
Beah: Thanks. No, I just said nice. Go ahead.
Aitor: So this is the quickest way that you can get into—into chat once you are like in search or browsing. From here you can do different things. You can continue chatting about—about the context of the page or any—or anything else really. You can expand this, this—this button basically. So if you wanna bring this into kind of like the full experience that you saw before, so you can just go there. And your chat is of course always like stored privately in your phone. Like this doesn’t go to any cloud or anything like that, like the history and the chatting like is—is fully on device basically. So that’s—that’s basically the—the fastest way to interact with chat when you are in—in a browser search mode.
Beah: Next. Cool. So looping back a little bit to—I was talking about optional being one of our core tenets of AI, how—how do we give users choice in these features?
Aitor: Yes, so every—every pretty much like everything that you’ve seen, and this is one of the challenges, has an associated setting. A lot of it has. So if you—if your user goes to AI features, this is where anything related to AI in the browser lives. And here you can find several things like Duck.ai—this toggle basically controls whether you will see Duck.ai at all. In our browser, as those like buttons, CTAs—CTA is like the quick CTAs like a button, if you will. So those buttons, those entry points, this is the master toggle for that. Then if you have it enabled, we provide couple experiences. The experience that you’re seeing is the toggle, which is this one in here, which is the one that we believe makes the experience better. But we give optionality to users if they just don’t like that toggle and they just like go to the regular address bar. We can—we can demo that a little bit later. And then in regards to whether or not we are gonna auto-attach the context of the page that you’re browsing, then you have this toggle here, this setting here that basically says automatically send it, which basically means as soon as you open that bottom sheet, we are gonna auto-attach the context so that you don’t need to do it if that is the most common action that you take. Or you can just disable, in which case like when you open the sheet, the context will not be attached and you have the optionality to attach it by—by that button basically that you saw in there. So if I disable the toggle and then we go back and then we create a new tab. You see that now you just don’t have that toggle, which is that nice affordance to switch seamlessly between search and Duck.ai, but still you can get to Duck.ai via the chat icon that we have in there close to the—to the mic. And then if you click in there, you just have access to like your new chat and then it’s exactly the same experience. Same goes for if you are browsing. So if you go to one page, you don’t have the toggle, but it’s still—you still have the same access to the sheet so that you can quickly chat with or without the context of the page that you are basically browsing at that point.
Beah: Yeah, the fact that I have also—Yeah, that’s—I’m thinking about—that’s because that—was—Got it. Thanks. Maybe like switching gears a little bit, you might—I don’t think you need to share your screen for this one, but if you wanted to close it down. Tell me, so like, h—integrating AI into a browser—or a browser that has AI capabilities is like a pretty undefined space compared to many things that we’ve worked on. Like it—nobody’s really figured out exactly how this should work and the capabilities and user goals are like changing every month. So I’m just curious, given all of the ambiguity around it, are there things that, you know, we’ve tried and haven’t worked or think like major learnings from the last year or so of working on this?
Aitor: So a good question. It’s hard to say. Like major learnings—well, like in regards to like the context of integrating AI in our browsers, like this is kinda like—it’s very hard in the sense that you cannot just—not the type of problem that is well known. You have a bunch of like other people doing the same thing and you can just like take inspiration for what is out there. Like I think pretty much everyone that is trying to do a similar thing is in the same position. So it’s very hard to understand what the users want and it’s very hard to anchor the experience around the right use case, which is in reality like—with AI, you can do anything. You can put AI on anything in a browser. You can do anything with AI. The hard thing is to understand what is actually valuable to the user versus what is like a more gimmicky type of stuff that users will—are gonna use it once and never again. So that’s I think is the hardest—one of the hardest things and challenges that—that—that we see. What—what is the—what have I found? Like I think when I came into—like this is like a personal learning to be honest. Like I don’t know if I—it applies to everybody, but when I came into the objective or integrating AI on the browsers, like I was more on the—on the spectrum of let’s just try to provide features that resonate and—and—and find that use case, anchor everything around that use case, right? And I think we—we initially realized very fast—realized that we—before we enter on that space, we needed to provide the right mechanisms for people to just access chat in a seamless way. So like we were always talking about from—open up to a search, open up to a chat, open up to continue your chat, continue your search, right? So I think that was like—for me personally, was kind of like a—I had to switch my—my—my mental model from let’s just provide value directly into the AI versus what we have is good. Let’s just give like the right accessibility, visibility and—and the right access points to it that—that it becomes seamless. That was probably for me personally the first learning that I got into getting into this objective.
Beah: Mm-hmm.
Beah: Yeah, like if you build a feature, they will not necessarily come unless you make the access to it and the discovery of it really, really good. And that’s a hard thing to do, I think, in browsers where we don’t—people don’t really have like super well-formed mental models, and then especially in a browser that’s like this big, like the size of a phone, you know, when you only have so much surface area to help a user find what they want.
Aitor: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Plus it’s very easy with a—at least for me, like it’s very easy to get excited with AI. Like there is like—like I said, like you can throw AI at anything basically and anything looks good and—and seems useful. So it’s very easy to get like—happy run about like—just just add all a bunch of like cool features and interesting features that you don’t really know whether they are gonna resonate or not with the user, but then you might miss like a little bit the point about let’s just make it very easy to get access, like very easy to use. And once you anchor that, then you can just move on to—to the—to the use cases that resonate more with the—with the users. And this is also like some of the learnings that we’ve seen in some of the user research that we’ve seen, which is—it’s not that some people—it’s not that they just don’t like AI, like the asset—like there is like you said, like there is like a whole spectrum from people that don’t like it to people that love it, and then anything in between.
Beah: Yeah.
Aitor: If we take anything in between. Like a lot of people they know it’s there, they wanna use it, but they don’t quite find the context where it’s useful. So this is one of the things that we’ve seen with people that—okay, I’m here, I wanna use it, but I just don’t know how—how would I use it now or my context or what I’m doing on my day to day, right? So I think this is one of the hardest part.
Beah: Yeah. Maybe that’s a good segue. This is my last question. Is there like—what’s your favorite thing about how AI is integrated into our browsers? And for instance, do you have like a use case, you know, a—how to use it that’s been very satisfying to you that others might appreciate too?
Aitor: So for—my almost like my number one use case is use context. So whenever I browse about something, I just go and say summarize this thing for me and then start chatting about it. I think that is probably one of my top usages. Yeah.
Beah: So you like go to a web page and you add the page context into the chat and then you can talk to the chat about the page context. Yeah, yeah.
Aitor: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That’s—I think that is the one that I—that I use the most for different things, like to compare things on a website to—to just because I’m lazy and there is like a bunch of like news and I want a TLDR before I decide what I click through. So there is like a bunch of like use cases for me. I also like—I use the same flow to be honest on a day to day to just start like a new chat. So if—regardless of what I’m doing, I open the browser and then I open the sheet and then I just don’t attach the context and I go to a chat immediately and start chatting about—I don’t know, the last exercise that I did and how—how I perform or not perform and things like that. Like anything that you would do with your—with your AI, right? But those are the two—the two main use cases for me that I pretty much do like every other day. And as far as accessibility goes, I personally like the toggle to be enabled—just just give me a much easier access between our browse mode and our chat mode. So I’m—I’m a toggle user—an a—a toggle user specifically.
Beah: Yeah. Yeah, same. Sometimes I like—don’t know whether like—I start typing and I don’t know yet whether I want search or chat. Like there’s—I have a—for me, there’s a bunch of like prompts or questions that I might ask that like are in a shared space, like just depending on what I feel like or my prediction for what’s gonna come back. I mean, especially with search assist and our search results, like sometimes I’ll start chatting thinking I want a search assist answer. And then I realize like my question’s getting long enough that probably what I really want is a, you know, chat and I can mid—mid-typing like swipe the toggle and you know it’s pretty satisfying. Cool. Awesome. All right. Well thank you so much, Aitor. I appreciate you joining the pod. And yeah. All right, talk to you later. Bye.
Aitor: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thank you, Beah. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you. Bye.


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In this episode, Cristina (Chief Marketing Officer) and Kamyl (Chief Comms & Public Affairs Officer) discuss the AI announcements of Google I/O, our response, and how our long-term stance on AI optionality led to rapid and record growth.
Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com
Cristina: Hi, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. We’ve been running Duck Tales for over six months now and have a strong and engaged following on Substack, especially. We’d love to get your feedback. What do you like or dislike about Duck Tales? What topics would you like to hear more about? Is there anything you’d like us to go deeper on? You can write to us at podcast at duckduckgo.com. That’s podcast at duckduckgo.com with suggestions. We will read all of them. And you can find our email in the show notes too. So with that said, hi, I’m Cristina. I’m on the marketing team. And today I’m here with Kamyl, who leads our communications and public affairs teams. And we’re gonna interview each other today. Kamyl, do you wanna say hi or anything else?
Kamyl: Ha ha. Greetings everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Cristina, I’m really excited to talk about our topic today with you.
Cristina: Awesome. Okay, so to jump in, DuckDuckGo has always been known for privacy, but lately we’ve been talking a lot about AI choice. How did private, useful, and optional become the lens we put on AI?
Kamyl: So I remember when ChatGPT first launched and I was talking to Gabriel a little bit about, you know, how do we think this is going to show up in DuckDuckGo? And I think one of the things that makes working here at DuckDuckGo really fun and different is that we get the freedom to think a little differently, and to say if everyone is doing one thing, how can we do it a little different. How can we think about AI in a way that’s uniquely DuckDuckGo? And that’s how we landed on private, useful, and optional. Private, what most people know about DuckDuckGo, we’ve always respected our users’ privacy, never collect search histories, anything like that. And we do the same with AI. Useful in that we never wanted to just launch an AI feature. Because it’s AI, but it actually had to do something helpful. It had to do something to improve the search experience or the browsing experience. And then optional, knowing that there are many people out there with many different opinions about AI, and opinions are still forming. Some people want the ability to use it to the their most its most extent. And some people don’t want to see it at all. And that, you know, because of a lot of big tech investments in a in a in AI like Google, they aren’t willing to necessarily just give AI a straight up off button. So we knew that those were things that we could do uniquely, put them together and then that became our lens.
Cristina: So because we are in this optional standpoint, we offer a no AI experience, we also offer things like Search Assist and Duck.ai. How do you respond to folks who might say that offering this range is contradictory?
Kamyl: Right. You know, I think it’s part of the it’s a major part of our goal at DuckDuckGo to let people use the internet how they wanna do it, but more privately and without trade-offs. And so some people want to use the internet with AI and some people want to use it without AI. And so to us, giving people a way to do whatever they want in a more private way without trade-offs feels really core to our mission. And so it’s not contradictory. We don’t have to have sort of one binary stance on it. We have to think about who our users are and what they want. And instead of forcing them into one experience, we think it’s the right thing to do to let them choose.
Cristina: Got it. So for you and I and the team, it’s been a very busy, very exciting few weeks. Yes. And this all started at the Google I/O conference. Can you tell us what was that and why did it have an impact on us?
Kamyl: Indeed it has. Yes. So Google I/O happens every year. It’s their developers conference and they announce you know, a extremely long laundry list of new features and products and things that they are excited about. And at the top of that list were changes to core Google search. Essentially that they were going to turn it and are in the process of turning it into a more AI forward experience that is turning the search bar into an AI chat bar. And essentially the moment that that happened we saw organic conversations about it explode over the internet. Why is Google doing this? They’re getting rid of blue links. Here we go again. The issues they we saw on AI Overviews. And it was a moment where you know, if Google has been trying to kind of boil the frog in terms of really slowly changing the experience to turn it into pretty much a full AI chat experience, this was the moment that the frog started to jump out a little bit. And that’s sort of what we saw on social, that people sort of saying. We have enough of this. This is making it worse. This is the last straw. And as people started doing that, you know, we saw people recommending DuckDuckGo in really high numbers. And also starting to download DuckDuckGo in much higher numbers than we were seeing before. Over the two weeks or th— really three weeks since the Google I/O conference, our installs are up thirty to forty percent above baseline. And so it was really exciting to see DuckDuckGo being a part of this conversation and people recognizing after you know talking about optionality for a long time, sort of people recognizing that that’s a really important part of our product and coming to us for that reason.
Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we saw this amazing conversation a folding unfolding around us. Can you go a little deeper in terms of how we joined the conversations, worked to reach more people and some highlights of what they were saying?
Kamyl: Absolutely. There were multiple Reddit threads about, you know, not only the the the news that Google was making these changes, but then about how much we had grown. At one point we had announced that search that that installs were up almost eighty percent, almost seventy-five percent from a pre-Google I/O baseline. And once this news got out and people were reacting to it, it it really just exploded. It was kind of an important social proof, I think, that people were interested in seeing that, you know, people aren’t just complaining about Google, but they’re actually trying out different things. We’ve even done some research about, you know, who are these new folks coming to DuckDuckGo and what are the reasons that they’re that they’re coming to us. And one of the top reasons is that they’re unsatisfied with Google’s search results. That the quality had gone down to to an extent that they had sort of finally had it. And, you know, of course many users feel trapped within the Google ecosystem, so it’s not exactly easy to leave. But I think installing us was sort of the easiest way to do that. And you know, seeing so many threads on Reddit, for example, with twenty K plus upvotes. I think we made the front page of Reddit. It was it was pretty amazing to watch.
Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. Well—
Kamyl: So as a part of that, you know, I want to now ask you a few questions. You know, that was sort of the tip of the spear when we saw this incredible engagement online. We thought, okay, how could we start to extend the conversation and maybe do some paid channels? What was our approach there? How did we start to pivot a little bit?
Cristina: Yeah, well we we saw this amazing organic growth and wanted to help amplify it. Normally we spend months planning a campaign and making creative, but this was very much about time is of the essence and we had to mobilize quickly. In a way, we had planned for this kind of moment, seeing the big reaction in this yes/no AI campaign we did earlier this year, and so the foundation was in place. We launched so many channels in record time. A national billboard campaign, including over a dozen in Times Square, radio, TV, YouTube, many, many channels. And the messages included things like big tech forces AI on you. We make it optional. And AI surveillance should be banned. AI should be optional and private. We wanted to be very straightforward, point to the moment we were reacting to, and share a bit of a TLDR manifesto.
Kamyl: Yeah, it was so fun to see the team work so quickly in getting all this new content up and then seeing seeing the response. So can you talk a little bit about what the response and the results have been like?
Cristina: Yeah, I mean, on the qualitative side, like we saw in the organic response, it was just incredible. Folks echoing our rallying cry, engaging with the ads, talking about it in a way we haven’t seen before. Social ads were getting tons of upvotes and shares, right? An ad getting upvotes, it kind of hurts my brain a little bit. But as a marketer, it’s amazing. And lots of jokes from people about how they actually like seeing this ad. To build on what you said earlier, we saw tons of installs and visits with a combination of the organic and the paid work that we did and you know records for for us internally. Installs climbed to a peak of about 75% above pre-announcement levels. And you know, again, I’ve settled down, but a really healthy baseline, above baseline. And then visits to no AI also surged, peaking at something like 6x what we had seen. And then on the marketing side, you know, we measure a host of other metrics like click-through rates. Which in some cases were three times better, which to me really indicates that people are interested and want to.
Kamyl: Yeah, the the ads with upvotes I think broke a lot of people’s brains. And I think one of my favorite kind of anecdotal things is has been just hearing from people. My you know, uncle saw the news about you guys. This is awesome. And just sort of hearing people throughout the company sort of feeling the momentum in their friends and family. Why do you think there was such a strong reception to this?
Cristina: I think it’s the same reason that our yes/no campaign earlier this year resonated so much. It’s because just because companies can put AI everywhere doesn’t mean consumers asked for it. And while others are racing to make AI unavoidable, we’re focused, as you said, on making it private, useful, and optional. And our view is simple AI should be on your terms, not the platform’s terms. And so we were speaking to a large, overlooked community who previously didn’t have a platform. Or a seat at the table with a tech company, we acknowledge them. While not saying AI is bad, but rather that AI should be optional and we offer both experiences. A lot of people are interested in AI, but they still want simplicity and control and choice. And that’s the space I think that DuckDuckGo serves, because consumers shouldn’t have to choose between trying AI and protecting their personal information. And I think always private is a much better proposition than just trust us, which seems to be the approach that many other companies are taking.
Kamyl: Yeah. So do you think we’re gonna keep talking about this? I feel like that that’s not optional. But what is what is what is next for us on our sort of next things we’re gonna be talking about?
Cristina: Yes, AI optionality and our messaging around it is not going away. Something we’re gonna hold near and dear for a long, long time, forever. And in fact, we are about to launch a new campaign that we’ve been planning for six months now. Maybe it’s already launched by the time you at home are seeing this. And in it we underscore optionality. So that if you are interested in AI, you can use it privately without having to worry about where that very personal information is going. It comes to life in a very visceral, cinematic way, and I’m really excited for everyone to see it and to continue to live in this moment that DuckDuckGo is having and for more people to come to the duck side.
Kamyl: You know, I hope people keep their eyes peeled wink wink for what’s to come. And thank you, Cristina, for this episode of Duck Tales and thanks everyone out there for listening. Looking forward to talking to you soon. Bye bye.
Cristina: Thank you.


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In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Fran (Engineering) discuss voice-mode in Duck.ai, common use cases, and how it’s private.
Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com
Beah: Hello, welcome to another episode of Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear about our vision, our product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. In this episode, you are going to hear about our voice AI chat feature. And I have with me today Fran, who played a very large role in building and shipping that feature. So Fran, do you want to just briefly introduce yourself?
Fran: Yeah, so hi everyone. I’m Fran. I’m an engineer at DuckDuckGo and I’ve been working on Duck.ai for a long time now and yes, I was heavily involved in building voice chat and yeah, it’s a very exciting feature.
Beah: Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us. And I’m Beah. For anyone who hasn’t already met me on one of these podcasts, I’m on our product team. Before, so I have a bunch of questions for Fran, but before I jump in, I want to make a ask of our listeners, actually. So we’ve been doing these podcasts for a little over six months, I think, now, and have a pretty good audience following on Substack. We would love to hear from you, our listeners, get some feedback about like things that you you like about how we’re approaching this, things maybe you don’t like, and also like what topics you would like us to talk more about so we can plan future episodes with your interests in mind. So if you have any feedback or want to talk to us, send us a note at podcast@duckduckgo.com. and we’ll also put that address in the show notes. So with that said, let’s talk more about voice chat. so Fran, can you just tell me like to get started, what is this feature? How does it work? Maybe you can give us a quick demo.
Fran: Yes, definitely. so voice chat is a hands-free conversation mode inside Duck.ai. so yes, so far our users have been able to talk with any with many chat models via text. And we wanted to provide a privacy focused way for you to just have a conversation with your model. There’s some really cool real-time models out there right now, and we wanted to incorporate this feature on Duck.ai as well. so yeah. With voice mode, you can basically have a call with the model and talk directly to it. It will listen, it will reply out loud. you can also interrupt it mid conversation and like if you want to correct or actually add some extra information, the model will stop and listen to you and then reply back. It can pick up a little bit how are you expressing yourself to also help that play into the response that it will give back to you.
Beah: They have people.
Fran: And so I have here on my phone Duck.ai. And if you want to use it, like we have this very handy voice chat, you can go there and you can just start talking. So can you give me the weather for New York today?
Beah: Yeah, yeah.
Fran: Just new it’s city in New York City, the temperature is around twenty eight degrees Celsius with a heavy thunderstorm. Celsius and the low tonight could drop to twenty-four degrees. There’s a heat advisory in effect as well, so it might feel quite humid. Make sure to stay hydrated and be prepared for possible flooding. You can also check the extended forecast on sites like AccuWeather or the Weather Channel. Yeah, that’s very nice. So yeah, you can ask follow-up questions inside the same session. Right now I’ve muted myself, so you can also mute in case you want the model to not hear you at the moment. And and yeah, it has access to web search as well, so you can also get the news, get weather information or any up to date information.
Beah: Nice. I am not too far from New York City and I can vouch for it being very humid today. cool. Yeah, so t tell me, I know that the demo, you know, I hopefully people can see it well enough f on the screen, but if you couldn’t, there’s like a little ghosty character with a bow tie. tell me a little bit. Who’s that? What’s his deal, his or her deal?
Fran: yes. so that is our voice mascot. we wanted to provide like a visual aid and like represent that the AI is speaking to you so you can just see when the AI is listening and replying back to you. So we created this mascot to be there with you during the session. And we wanted this mascot to also have a little nod to Dax, our technical mascot.
Beah: Yeah.
Fran: so that’s why it has also the green bow tie and it’s white, so it it it’s it’s a nod to Dax. Yeah.
Beah: Yeah, so if you’re not familiar with Dax, that’s the name of the DuckDuckGo duck that you see, the Debonair, yeah. duck with the bow tie. awesome. and by the way, like on the point about the dem demoing this is a little bit challenging because of the audio and the back and forth, but just go like after this podcast or in the middle of this podcast, go try it. it’s you know, if you don’t already have the DuckDuckGo app, you can download the DuckDuckGo app on your phone. You can also try it on desktop.
Fran: Yeah.
Beah: And actually, Fran, I should ask, is it free or do users have to pay to use voice chat?
Fran: It is completely free. so our free tier users can access voice chat directly from either that button or the sidebar as as you could see. And yes, with with the pro and plus subscriptions you do get more time to speak with the model, but it’s available for everyone right now on your phone on or desktop.
Beah: Awesome. cool. So maybe can you tell me a little bit about why we decided to build it at all? Like what instigated this whole project?
Fran: yeah, so like I was saying before, like we there’s some cool voice models out there and we wanted to give like this hands-free way for people to talk with with our with their chat model. and we also wanted to have a private way for them to speak, so we did put in place some technical ways for us to improve like our privacy and anonymizing your voice when we when you’re connecting to the provider to speak with it. and yeah we want to give you this free hands-free way of talking with the model is also better for accessibility like we’ve gotten feedback like some people struggle using the text chat so with this you can just connect and start talking with the model uninterrupted.
Beah: Even the. Yeah. Okay.
Fran: So yeah, it’s been a very, a very cool feature. And we know voice is a very unique thing for the users, so we wanted to provide a way for our users to be able to use that in a private and secure environment.
Beah: Everything. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Can you is there anything else that you wanna add about like how we handled priv like how we made it in fact meaningfully private?
Fran: Yes, definitely. it was challenging because right now there is so many different ways to handle voice models that are out there. Like different providers have different ways that they provide. Like we did this connection directly with the model using real-time web technologies. So you’re actually like having a call with the model. but there are other ways where you could parse the conversation, maybe turn to text, but then a lot of the details and the nuances of your talk can be lost in between. So we found we looked into this balance of having a good user experience while also preserving your privacy. So the way also that we build, like there is this relay in between you and the provider, and we anonymize all the metadata and the information of your call. So the provider doesn’t really know who you are. Although your va your voice is still unique to you. You should be mindful of that. But apart from that, everything else we anonymize during the call. Yeah.
Beah: Hmm. That’s cool. just to like kind of loop back to what you were saying about the why we build it in the first place. I’m personally like I’m not a huge voice input person. I know a lot of people are, but I don’t usually talk to my phone unless I’m actually calling a human. and I found it pretty cool ‘cause like, I don’t know, it is really convenient sometimes just to not I don’t know, they’re like when you’re on the go or something, right? And don’t have your typing fingers available. I’ve I’ve actually found that pretty handy and just been like impressed by how slick it is with the like hand it handling interruption. And I know we had to dial that in a little bit, like at least on my iPhone, it was way too sensitive at first and it thought like all the background noises were interruptions and yeah. But I I think now it’s pretty slick.
Fran: Yeah. No, it’s super cool and we’ve gotten so many positive feedback like from I’ve got people who reach out to me and say like I was stuck in traffic so I wanted to check something real quick so they use voice mode so they could still pay attention around them and like while they were sitting there waiting for traffic to move, they could quickly use and make some lookups. I’ve heard from people that also use it to practice a different language since the model can understand so many different languages. And even me, I’ve tried like speaking in one language and then switching to my native, like speaking English and then switching to my native one, and it can pick up like flawlessly. it’s it’s very nice. Yeah, I I enjoy a lot the the hands-free and versatility of it, and I’ve yeah, I I’ve used for a few things where
Beah: Nee. Yeah.
Fran: Me speaking is easier than me typing down what I want to to ask the model about. Yeah.
Beah: Yeah, I’ve been using it like I guess as like a thought partner. Sometimes if I’m like walking my dog and I’m thinking through something complex, it’s the kind of thing that like if my husband were walking alongside me, I would start just like, you know, spewing thoughts at him as a sounding board. I start spewing it at you know, Duck.ai instead. And I don’t know, it’s been kinda cool.
Fran: Yeah.
Beah: t tell me, Fran, like do you have a either a favorite thing or a favorite use case about about voice chat?
Fran: Yeah, so I I’ve used it a little bit in the past to help me when I need to write a write down like some idea that I have in my mind or like formulate some something that I want to share with a colleague but I really cannot put into words but I can express myself. So I would open voice chat and then like speak for a whole minute saying, I want to say this, but not exactly that word, but so like you’re saying, like this thought process. And then at the end I say, now summarize what I’ve said in two sentences, and it has been like really helpful to help me like consolidate a lot of flying ideas. And with web search that we added after the release, I also find it really nice, like to get, give me a summary of the news in my city today, or do these quick lookups where I can have it on the side speaking to me while also doing multitasking and doing something else. So yeah, it’s it’s been pretty nice for those use cases.
Beah: I mean I could. Nice. Awesome. Well, anything else that you wanna add before we wrap?
Fran: just want to invite everybody to use voice chat. I I’m biased, but I really like this feature. I I find it really cool, really like our ghosty guy. And and yeah, please test it out and share any feedback that you have with us. We are always looking for ways to improve our features and voice chat and Duck.ai in general. So, yes, please hit the share feedback button and we’ll definitely appreciate.
Beah: Does the ghosty guy have a name?
Fran: No, we didn’t give a name. Maybe if if anyone suggests a one that we like, maybe.
Beah: Yeah, I think you should have naming privileges Fran, so think about it.
Fran: Yeah, I’ll think I’ll think about some ideas. Yeah.
Beah: We Yeah, okay. Sounds good. I was gonna suggest Fran, but maybe you don’t want Fran. Yeah. Cool. Okay. Awesome. Well thanks so much for for joining and and congrats on this neat feature that you launched.
Fran: Ghosty Bow tie. Thank you so much.
Beah: All right. Talk to you later, Fran.
Fran: Take it. See you soon.


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