Now that everything revolves around Artificial Intelligence, we can find advances with this technology in many fields. From the revolutionary Chat-GPT, through its integration into Internet search engines like Bing, to AI image enhancement, noise cancellation, game improvements, and much more.
DuckAssist: How to Use DuckDuckGo’s AI Assistant
The browser focused on privacy and security has also launched its own assistant, we are going to tell you How to use DuckAssist, DuckDuckGo’s AI assistant.
This new assistant based on Artificial Intelligence allows us to make searches basing their results on information contained in Wikipedia. Thanks to the use of the natural language of OpenAI and Anthropic, Wikipedia searches are summarized and will go directly to the point of your question, thus avoiding the unnecessary part that we can find within Wikipedia and other sources when we carry out regular searches.
By relying on sources such as Wikipedia, this assistant will generally offer answers that will not be invented, as is the case with other Artificial Intelligences. This is because the AI generates a response, whether it knows it or not, and sometimes a wrong or wrong response can result.
Thanks to the DuckAssist system, this probability is greatly reduced. But DuckAssist isn’t perfect either, so you can sometimes make mistakes in your answers, especially if you ask very difficult questions.
So this privacy-focused anonymous helper, even in AI-powered searches, is not meant to compete against Chat GPT and its chatbot variants, embedded in different software that are appearing very frequently, but rather to interact and deliver results more natural to users.
Since they don’t rely on another AI but intend to train their own, DuckAssist will continue to provide better and better answers as the knowledge base is updated. In addition, they also intend to promote this assistant by giving different uses beyond providing natural answers based on Wikipedia in relation to users’ questions in their browser.
At the moment it is in the testing phase, if all goes well it is intended to take the responses of DuckDuckGo and other applications on a regular basis. We also find that it is currently only available in English, but it is intended to be brought to many other languages later.
Having seen a little about its operation and its plans for the future of this assistant based on Artificial Intelligence, and that bases its operation looking at the privacy of the users, let’s see how to use it .
How to use DuckAssist
Since DuckAssist works on top of the DuckDuckGo search engine, the main requirement is to use this search engine so that DuckAssist can generate results and display them using this AI.
Toobtain DuckDuckGo, we will simply have to enter its web page, in the same way that we do with any other search engine.
If we use Chrome, generally the search engine is Google, in the same way that in Microsoft Edge we will find Bing by default, but this can be changed very easily and get your favorite default search engine in your favorite browser.
For this DuckDuckGo has released an extension that is installed in the most used browser, Google Chrome, as long as the extension is enabled you can use DuckDuckGo’s private searches.
This includes some responses from DuckAssist, as DuckAssist is embedded within browser responses. If you want to experiment with DuckAssist in Google Chrome, you have the option of installing this extension called DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, which you can manage very easily.
Installing it will change our default browser to DuckDuckGo, this will allow us to use DuckAssist. It will also allow us to browse anonymously protecting our data by any other website since it is possible to enable the extension for each tab separately.
Once the extension is installed or by entering DuckDuckGo.com directly, we will have access to DuckAssist to be able to test this new AI. As it is currently in the Beta phase, we are going to tell you some tips and tricks to get the most out of it.
Simply write the question you need in the DuckDuckGo search engine and many of them will be answered automatically with DuckAssist.
This wizard is integrated into the responses offered by the browser, so you don’t need to do or install anything to be able to use it. It is true that it will not appear every time, but with these tips and tricks you will be able to make the most of the assistant, obtaining its answers instead of the usual search engine results.
Tricks to get the most out of DuckAssist
As it is the first version, we must treat DuckAssist in a more direct way if we want to obtain results based on this assistant. For this, we will see how to ask questions that will generate answers through this AI.
It is better to express the search in question format, so there will be more possibilities that, in addition to the conventional results, we will obtain an answer from the assistant based on this Artificial Intelligence.
For example, you can ask “How many inhabitants does the planet Earth have?” instead of expressing it without the question format “inhabitants of planet earth”. Remember that the questions must be asked in English, at least for the moment.
It is also recommended, in response types commonly and reliably found on Wikipedia, to add the word “wiki” at the end, thus forcing the AI to use the wizard to display the response.
As an example we have the previous question, to which we can add “wiki” at the end, we can also ask how many inhabitants Madrid have? “wiki”, remember to click on “Ask” to generate the answer in real-time.
The assistant will save the information of the questions that we have already asked, so if we repeat a question we will get the same answer.
You have to be objective and not go around the matter too much, ask directly to get your answer as a summary and generated by AI from the information obtained from Wikipedia.
Poorly defined questions will not generate any output from the wizard, you should avoid this type. For example, we will not get a correct answer if we ask how many wheels does a vehicle have?
DuckAssist has a small configuration panel in which we can activate and deactivate some options. The first option we find is DuckAssist, we can deactivate it to force not to receive a response based on this assistant.
The second option that we find is for the animation that simulates a writing, we can activate or deactivate it to see this animation or not. Finally, we can enable the autoresponder, so we will eliminate the need to click on “Ask” when we want to get a response from DuckAssist.
The AI that pays attention to your privacy
To use DuckAssist, as we have seen, it is not necessary to log in or offer your data in the search engine. Simply access the web and start writing. To obtain the best results, it is advisable to follow the tricks that we have left you in the previous section and you will have quality answers.
At the moment its knowledge base is on Wikipedia, but later it will be possible to train with other sources, always thinking about the user’s privacy so as not to leave a trace of your searches.
Enter and ask this assistant and get a text in natural language with the answer, thanks to its knowledge base its success rate is higher than other AI, which will generate an answer, even if the subject is not known to them.