Duck Tales: AI in the DuckDuckGo browser — private, useful & optional (Ep.36)

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.

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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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