For those who choose to use AI as part of their search workflow, the feature is rolling out for free with daily limits, with higher caps for DuckDuckGo subscribers. Here are the details.
The optional new feature is rolling out to free users and subscribers
Last March, DuckDuckGo announced Duck.ai, its chatbot platform that offers a private way to search or talk to 3rd-party LLMs from frontier AI labs such as OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Mistral.
As the year progressed, Duck.ai got new features, such as image generation, which we covered here.
Today, the platform released yet another feature: voice mode. It follows the same privacy principles as the rest of the company’s tools and features, meaning that chats are anonymized by DuckDuckGo and never used to train the underlying AI.
DuckDuckGo explains that OpenAI is the model provider for all voice chats, but that the streamed audio “is not stored by DuckDuckGo or by OpenAI (…) after the chat ends.” The company also says that “OpenAI is contractually limited in how they can use voice chat data to what is necessary to perform their services.”
Here’s a bit more, directly from DuckDuckGo:
When you start a voice chat, Duck.ai connects you to an OpenAI model through an encrypted relay connection that we cannot decrypt. Your microphone audio is streamed in real time to OpenAI, where the model listens, transcribes what you say, and generates both a spoken and text response.
Duck.ai’s voice chat is currently available on most browsers, except Firefox, for which support is “coming soon.” The company also says that while every user is subject to daily limits, subscribers have a higher cap than in the free version.
Given the recent pushback on AI-based features, DuckDuckGo wants to make sure users understand that this, alongside every other AI feature to come out of its labs, is entirely optional. And even for users who decide to use Duck.ai’s voice mode and change their minds later, they can disable it from Duck.ai Settings.
To learn more about Duck.ai’s new real-time voice mode and go deeper into the company’s data handling policies for the feature, follow this link.
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