In this episode, Gabriel (Founder & CEO) speaks with Nirzar (Duck.ai lead) about how we’re making AI more useful by letting users choose the tone and length of AI responses.

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Gabriel Hello again, welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and talk about things going on inside the company and features for building, cetera, et We’re gonna talk AI again. Today I have Nirzar with me. Nirzar, you wanna introduce yourself?

NirzarYeah, sure. the designer for Duck.ai. I kind of lead the product. And yeah, we’ve been working together. Yeah, mean, yeah, it’s actually been super nice to have like that product here. And yeah, I’ve been kind of working on Duck.ai for last two years. Actually, we started like doing the MVP together, Gabe, you and I, we were kind of playing around.

Gabriel You’re more than a designer. You’re more than a designer at this point.Yes, indeed. So Duck.ai is our chat equivalent, AI chat equivalent. ⁓ It’s private chat. You can access popular models from within it. What are the model providers we have now? Here’s our.

Nirzar Right now we are offering GPT4 Mini which is our default. We also started offering GPT5 Mini which is the newest model from OpenAI. Actually a lot of people are using it a lot more than we expected. But we also like focusing on open source models obviously. So the OpenAI is open source model, Llama and Mistral as well and Cloud Antropiq. So yeah, it kind of fits into our idea about just giving a lot of choice to the users, yeah.

Gabriel Model choice, all the major providers. Yeah, okay. So my quick spiel on our AI approach that I gave last time, but for anyone new. Approach to AI, private, useful, optional, private. In this case, know, it applies to all our AI features, but in this case, you know, we anonymize chats. We don’t train on data. We have bunch of other privacy features in there. Do you want to hit on a couple?

Nirzar Hmm.Yeah mainly I think the storing the chats on your local devices, I think a big one. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the like the biggest sort of thing that we’ve been pursuing is also having like retention of chats and like not having any retention in most cases, which is actually like most industry standard. ⁓

Gabriel Yes, if you have recent chats, they’re gonna be stored on your local device, not on DuckDuckGo servers.

Nirzar And we’re also looking into some private inference stuff, but we’ll get to that later.

Gabriel Great, mainly anonymous and not training. Useful, we’re gonna get to that in a second, because we’re gonna talk about customization, which I think is a super useful feature that we added recently. And then optional, just a couple words on that. ⁓ All our AI features are optional, including Duck.ai. I mean, obviously you can choose not to use it if you don’t wanna use it in general. In our integrations into our search engine and browser, we have settings that will turn it off.

Gabriel So there’s no integration of the search engine if you don’t want it. No integration of the browser if you don’t want the entry points. Although we do think you should check it out because we do think it’s useful in private. ⁓ But we understand people who don’t want to do that for various reasons.

Nirzar Yep. If you’re gonna use it somewhere else, it’s better to use it here if you care about privacy.

Gabriel That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. Okay. So back to useful customization. We’re here today to talk about feature that we’ve been working on. You want to introduce it, maybe share screen.

Nirzar Yeah, I can go through it. Yeah, no, I just like remember where it came from when you asked me to talk about it and I remember you were kind of annoyed at like use of emoji and responses and also like how big the responses are. I sometimes like it but I gotta get that and I think what you mentioned was like if like I don’t like it, I’m pretty sure a bunch of people don’t like it as well. So we kind of talked about like, hey.

Gabriel Yes, I’m very Gen X and I don’t like emojis. ⁓Yes.

Nirzar Like I think what kind of we concluded was just the idea that like there is not like a single personality that we can land on that will like kind of suit everyone. And we always try to give choice to users. ⁓ So I think this kind of fits into the choice and control obviously. And this kind of fits into that ⁓ category. Let me just give you a demo quickly of how it works.

Gabriel Yeah, while you’re doing that,

where I was coming from with that too, was like chatting, this whole feature of chatting is very obviously conversational. like you’re talking to somebody, know, that we’re personifying the AI in this case. I mean, there are people you like to talk to and there are people you don’t like to talk to, there are people you like their texts and there are people you don’t like their texts. Here you can control that. And that would be the idea is to give users control about like what kind of responses. If you’re going to be chatting with this thing a lot.

NirzarYeah.

Yeah

Gabriel Like, what do you want it to sound like, you know? I think that’s kind of the idea for me. And not everybody would choose the same thing.

Nirzar Yeah, it’s very personal. think this personality thing is very kind of difficult to nail down on anything. In those cases, it’s just better to sort of give that ⁓ to each user. They can decide what they want. So I’ll just show one quick thing. By the way, I think a lot of this was like, it’s reusing a lot of these tools. like ChatGPT also has something similar, but I think what you and like what we wanted to do is just like putting it like friend and center. So basically like this is a very small example. Don’t take greetings to chatbots are any popular anymore, but let’s say you are, no?

Gabriel I’m not seeing it yet, Nirzar. I got a black screen, so, nah, weird. Try to reshare. It worked before. We tested this. Try it one more time. it doesn’t work, I’ll try mine. there you go. Yeah, it works now. Go for it.

Nirzar Yeah, we tried that. I would be surprised. All right, perfect. ⁓ Yeah, so we also wanted to like kind of put it front and center. And this is one example of just like saying.

Gabriel I think that’s super important because it’s like it’s a front and center thing. you’re going to, this is a very important thing to change the personality. So it’s not hidden behind settings. That’s a big design departure.

NirzarYeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t think like anybody else had this like this prominent and it kind of like incentives to use it as well. Try it out, see how it works. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. ⁓ So yeah, I think the personality thing that we were talking about was just like, like the tonality, like use of emojis, for example, but like, as you can see, this is like a base model. It’s like Claud, Sonnet 4 and if you ask it,

How’s it going? It’s like, it’s nice to connect with you. How are things on your end? This is like not a very good way to like, these words just like make me a little bit irk. But yeah, like I mean, this is like if you just customize it and this is what we came up with to begin with, which is like just the idea of like customizing the tone or like how long the response should be or like naming is also pretty good.

Nirzar Like if I just ask it to call me by name. By the way, all of this is kind of stored on your local device to protect your privacy again.

Gabriel Yeah, actually, one thing we didn’t say is you don’t even need an account to use Duck.ai. You can just show up at Duck.ai and start doing this without anything. And you can use pseudonyms too, you know.

Nirzaryeah. Actually, you know what?

Yeah, but you know what like when we didn’t think about it when we like made Duck.ai without logins But like when we released it like the biggest positive thing was like people were like, I don’t have to sign up It’s like a huge deal apparently but like I don’t think we thought about it that much but it’s really good I think that that’s why it worked really well. Anyway, sorry coming back to this I digress ⁓

Gabriel That’s what we would call a strategy credit for being a privacy company since we don’t have accounts. We didn’t even have an ability to log in.

Nirzar Hahaha Sorry, we..Sorry, I meant we thoroughly thought about it and it was a great decision. ⁓ Okay, so I’m gonna ask it to call me by my new real name and I’m gonna say my tone, I want it to be like a little bit more playful, as I said connect with you. This is pretty simple. If I apply it, it’s going to store it on your thing. there is a much great I like it. ⁓ Anyways, but instantly just like