In this episode, Gabriel (founder) and Beah (VP, Product) discuss functional and non-functional product delight, how we’ve created 350+ versions of our mascot (and counting), and why AI is so bad at adding mustaches to Ducks.

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GabrielHello again, welcome to Duck Tales. ⁓ I think this is gonna be episode four. Hopefully it’s getting better. Today I am not interviewing Beah. Beah’s actually gonna interview me about a feature that’s fun that I think you’ll enjoy. But Beah, you wanna introduce yourself?

BeahSure. I’m Beah. I’m on the product team here at DuckDuckGo. Been here about six years. So seen a lot of things that have happened in recent DuckDuckGo product history. I, Delight is a favorite topic, a theme of mine. So I’m glad to be doing this conversation.

GabrielYes, indeed. Yes, speaking of the light, my favorite dog is behind you. Because I don’t have a dog. Well, I don’t have a dog, and it’s the dog I interact with most. Friday.

BeahHe’s your favorite. Certainly the one that attacks you the most, playfully attacks you the most. Yeah. Yes, that’s that’s Friday, everyone. He is usually not so low energy as he looks right now.

GabrielThat’s true. Yeah. The bar might be low. But yes, so I forgot to say DuckTales is obviously inside DuckDuckGo, behind the scenes kind of information about things we’re doing and how the company works and features we’re building and all that kind of stuff. ⁓ And as you noted, we have a delightful feature ⁓ that we’d like to talk about today. But I worked on it, it was actually part of Hack Days. We had a previous episode, it was also a feature came out of Hack Days. But yeah, shoot some questions at me and I will respond.

BeahSure. Tell us the origin, Gabriel. How did you come to decide to work on this?

GabrielYes, so what are we talking about? First of all, if you ⁓ search some special words, often characters like Spider-Man, Batman kind of thing, ⁓ the logo, our logo, Dax the Duck for those people don’t know, will change and he will be costumed ⁓ in that character ⁓ in the little logo on the search engine. We actually did this a long time ago. So we used to do like our version of Google doodles or whatever on the homepage. Maybe like literally 15 years ago at this point, ⁓ up until maybe 2012 ish. ⁓ We stopped doing it because it was hard to do. It took a lot of time to make the, make the especially logos. It also confused a lot of people because we put it up in like kind of random situations, like someone may have died or hollowed something and people who didn’t know about that person or holiday were just like what what what is going on with this but a lot of people really liked it and especially liked just the idea and the fun I would call delight as we’re gonna get to the the changing logo and that just the funness of dressing up a character ⁓ and I also am in that category so I’ve been wanting to bring this back for like 10 years but had no great way to do it

⁓ And then enter, enter AI. I thought that AI could be useful ⁓ making these specialty logos in some way. ⁓ When I first tried it, it was not, and I tried different versions of image models. But then finally I was hack days a few months ago, got it to work. ⁓ And so now we’ve been making them.

BeahOkay. Okay.

GabrielOne of suggestions of the community and team members and putting them up as Easter eggs. Yeah.

BeahDo you want to just say what hack days is for anybody who doesn’t know.

GabrielYeah, so Hack Days is every quarter, anyone who wants to participate in the company, and we’re about 300 people at this point, maybe 350 or something, can get together and create work on anything they want, really. It often is like features, ideas, and maybe designer, engineer, new, don’t have to be a product person, but they don’t have to be engineering a product, they can just join and collaborate, come up with something exciting. It could be like little things like fixing bugs or things in our product, but often like things people are really excited about like this for me. I actually tried it in two different ways. I wanted to do this idea, but I also wanted to get back into programming and try out all the AI programming tools. So in doing this, I actually used AI for the first time, like end to end to like write the code.

BeahOkay. Okay. ⁓what AI tools do you use?

GabrielI used Curser to kind of manage the creation of the tool. And then I used ⁓ the ChatGPT Create Image API to really be the generation of this. I can share my screen a little bit and we can look at

BeahYeah, show us some.

GabrielYeah, let me do that. Sharing screen, window. Okay. Let me actually. this way. Okay, can you see this? Sweet. Okay, so ⁓ this is one of my favorites. So if you search the dude, which is a character from The Big Lebowski, I move this so I can see you still. ⁓ And you put your mouse over, you can see Dax is now decked out in the sweater and sunglasses. And I put this in a new tab so you can see it ⁓ zoomed in a bit. ⁓

BeahOkay. Okay.

GabrielSo this is kind of the idea. A few of my other favorite ones so you can get the ideas. If you search Hydra, ⁓ you get this,

Gabrielyou know, and multi-dex, if you will. Moona Nights, for those who don’t know, that’s an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character. ⁓

BeahJust for the record. I did not know that.

GabrielAre you serious you know or you didn’t know it? Okay, you might have noticed there’s a big Moon poster in our office. You walk through it because we go there sometimes. And the final one I throw up is the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. I just like the idea that Dax is a duck, but you can also make this work with like a mixture of animals, which is fun. Yeah, okay. So a couple of things I want to point out.

BeahHmm. Yeah. did you decide how to like, how did you figure out who to do this for, what characters to do this for?

GabrielYes, best part about this is, I didn’t for the most part. I put this up and we came up with some guidelines internally, like we’re not doing alive people, that kind of thing, mainly characters. And I just asked ⁓ for suggestions internally. Once I had like initial set, I posted it and I’ve been getting internal suggestions from the get-go. So at this point, I just go ⁓ every few weeks.

And there’s magically more suggestions from our team members in there. And I haven’t heard of, would say, 60 % of them. And I will just kind of make them happen. The tool that does that, just to show you this a little bit, which is kind of fun, is, so this is an internal tool. I did this for suggestions that are real suggestions right now. So this is like internal stuff. These might come. I have no idea what Podman is, by the way. I just said this this morning.

GabrielI literally just gave it the word Athena and it based on this big image prompt that I can show you in a minute and it’ll generate 10 probe and I suggest variations and then we’ll pick one that seems like it matches the best. Often times, sometimes about 50 % of the time it’s pretty good off the get go like this. And then another 50 % of the time. It doesn’t know what to do. Like this is, there’s mustaches all over the place. We talk about that. I don’t know what pod man is exactly, but I’m assuming none of this is great for it. So what I’m to have to do for this one is figure out what pod man is and then give it a little more instruction. And this is another one that I think is kind of working for the most part. ⁓ Wednesday Adams, although it looks a little angry. So like we want to keep it friendly. So I probably will give a little suggestion about that.

Beah⁓ You want to talk about the mustache problem?

GabrielYeah, so you pointed this out after we had about 100 that like AI is really bad at placing mustaches on decks. It like, you can see in the array of these, they don’t even ask for a mustache on this one. But like this one’s like on the beak. This one’s in the beak, I guess he’s eating it.

BeahYeah. Yes, those are my favorite when they’re eating their own mustache. My theory for tell me how outlandish this is, my theory is that the internet doesn’t have a lot of pictures of ducks with mustaches and thus the training material is inadequate. Although I think with this initiative, probably improving on that.

GabrielI’ve been trying to just avoid it at this point. I think it’s a good theory. I have definitely tried, I tried for like a couple of days to like get better mustache instructions and it did not work. A couple of things I wanted to highlight. So what’s actually been most fun about this now is that, because the intention was to delight people from Easter eggs. The community, especially on ou