DuckDuckGo is the latest search engine to launch an AI assistant

Search engine DuckDuckGo now has an artificial intelligence-based assistant of its own.

Called DuckAssist, the new feature uses generative AI, developed in partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI and AI research company Anthropic, to answer users' queries in a more conversational way.

For example, if you ask DuckDuckGo about the color of the dress that went viral back in 2015, it will give you a straight up answer and a bit more info on how the dress came to be, instead of merely providing a list of topics on the subject.

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While that's far from conversing with an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT, it can be a quicker and easier way to get exactly the info you need, without having to click through several links to find it.

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To create these summaries, DuckAssist uses Wikipedia (and, occasionally, sites like Britannica), so the result is not that different from, say, Google's Wikipedia-based summaries which appear for certain queries. However, DuckDuckGo says that DuckAssist is "first in a series of generative AI-assisted features" that the company hopes to roll out "in the coming months."

DuckAssist won't appear for every query, and it does sometimes make mistakes, DuckDuckGo warns. Credit: DuckDuckGo

DuckAssist is free to use and open to everyone, but it won't show up on the web; instead, it's currently limited to DuckDuckGo's browsing apps and browser extensions. The company says it plans to roll it out to everyone should this trial go well.

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DuckDuckGo is a privacy-oriented search engine that promises anonymity, and DuckAssist is similarly anonymous and does not require logging in.

The feature comes a few weeks after Microsoft added an AI chatbot to its search engine, Bing. Google is also working on an AI chatbot called Bard, which will complement its search results.