In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Esteban (Design) discuss AI chat organization, from automatic chat naming to ‘pinning’ your most used chats.

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Gabriel: Hello, welcome to DuckTales. Inside DuckDuckGo features people, et cetera. You got me as the host again, this time I’m the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo. And I got Esteban with me today. Esteban, wanna introduce yourself?

Esteban: Sure. Hi everyone. I’m Esteban. Hi Gabriel. Esteban, I’m a designer in the team.

Gabriel: Sweet. And that’s what we’re talking about today, Duck AI, and in particular, kind of new features we’ve been introducing around conversation organization that Estevan has been designing and working on. And we’ve been releasing kind of a few of these over the last couple of months. You want to just jump in, you want to share your screen and walk us through it. I realize we have some of this on audio now only.

Esteban: Sure.

Gabriel: Let’s also try to describe what we’re seeing while we do it. I’ll do the same thing.

Esteban: Yes, for sure. Let me just share my screen and I’ll walk you through a few of the things that we recently dumped. Yes, so if you’re like me, you have tons of like conversations going on at the same time. What we have seen from users is that people who are very engaged with our platform, they end up having tons of conversations and then sometimes it’s harder to get back to them and to find the one that you needed. So we launched three things. The first one, I’ll show you an example. I was trying to see if I should ask you for a promotion during this podcast. Clearly no. ⁓ But the cool thing was that we, yeah, I will wait for a better time. ⁓ The first thing that we shipped was that we had ⁓ a title, the title of our,

Gabriel: Good answer.

Esteban: Chats were basically the same first prompt. It was just duplicated. That would make it harder to read. So the first thing that we launched was this automatic titling. We’re using the LLM to come up with a better title at the top. So it’s easier to find. ⁓

Gabriel: So this is similar to how ChatGPT and some other competitors are doing it, right? So like we used to do just to repeat, so I understand fully, I think I do, ⁓ having reviewed this when it launched, but just to make sure. ⁓ Yeah, we used to just literally repeat the prompt as your title, like the beginning of the prompt. And so that it was kind of weird sometimes and duplicated sometimes, but now we run in the background something that... ⁓

Esteban: Definitely Right.Yeah.

Gabriel: Summarizes it for you and then automatically does this. You don’t have to do anything, right?

Esteban: Yes. Exactly. And for example, I’m trying a new one. What day is today? That’s my prompt. And then immediately what I get as a title is day to day. The one thing is that sometimes the title is not exactly what you will call it. Like maybe day to day is not super descriptive. So we added this minor option, no? So we can say, I don’t know, day to day, it’s Thursday. Simple but useful.

Gabriel: So if you want to do whatever you want, yeah, like if you don’t like our casing or something, you can put everything in lowercase or whatever, you can just rename it at will, yeah.

Esteban: Yeah. Exactly. Yes, so after you have you want to name stuff, it’s very helpful when you have like several chats about something similar, but you want to have it personalized so it’s easier to find. So super simple, nothing that I don’t know, it’s blowing innovation in a way, but very useful. The second one is we noticed how ⁓ lots of our users were asking us for ways to save conversations and finding the conversations faster. We also have a limit of how many conversations you can have right now. There’s just 30 chats after the 30th chat. The next one gets deleted. We’re working on that, but we wanted to offer a way for you to say what’s important for you and why are the things that you want to come back to it. So I don’t know, this one. Let’s say it’s something that I was working on today, but I want to come back to it.

add it to the top of the list by pinning it. So now it’s pinned at the top and it will always be there. That also means that if DocAI needs to delete one of your chats, it will go to the last one on the list and this one will not get deleted. You can pin up to five chats right now and yeah, it’s always accessible, always at the top, easy to reach.

Gabriel: Got it, so it’s kind of the equivalent of like a favorite or a star or a pin in this case. All of these things are accessible from this three dot hover menu next to the ⁓ chat, chat to the individual chat. And then also you’re saying, is good, that ⁓ because the reason why we have the 30 limit at the moment is because all this is stored locally on your browser. It’s not actually stored on our servers. ⁓

Esteban: Exactly.

Gabriel: we’re working on an encrypted storage that we won’t have the keys to where you can get a much higher limits on it. But at the moment, or if you just want to keep it local, there is a local limit because your browser has storage limits. ⁓ But what this will allow you to do is keep ones around that you really want around, right? So you’re saying if you favorite these or pin them, in our words here, you have a pin section at the top. But if you start making a lot of chats, the non-pin ones will get.

Esteban: second.

Gabriel: kind of blown away first.

Esteban: Exactly. Exactly. ⁓ We have plenty of requests about chat organization and some people are going as far as like, want to create projects, want to create groups, I want to organize my stuff, which it all makes total sense. And I guess up to a point you need those sort of organization tools, but the simple ones will cover most of the needs for most of our users, I would say, because maybe you have a few chats where you keep coming back to them, but then you have a bunch of quick requests, quick checkups with the LLM.

And something like this is super simple. It doesn’t require a lot of effort. And yeah, we hope it helps a lot of our users.

Gabriel: And you mentioned in there a few times like we did this and we’re working on this, these features in particular because we get a lot of user requests for them. ⁓ So speaking to that a little bit, like my understanding is, you know, we get lots of feedback. ⁓ We’re looking through it all and kind of organizing it, like which are the most like important issues to work on. But then also when we launch features, cause to your point, people ask for all sorts of different things. And then we, and like you in particular, design. And you’re like, well, I think this is gonna be a satisfaction of a lot of people’s requests, even if that’s not exactly the thing they asked for. And then we put it out and then how do we know whether it worked or not? Like, what are we looking at?

Esteban: Yes, so to answer your question, we see a usage in particular. We don’t have, of course, data about a particular users, but we know that roughly X amount of people are using this feature. We also know from social media, we got a little bit of love ⁓ after posting that we launched this. And then the other thing that’s a really interesting metric is we see the feedback coming in. ⁓ and comparing with what kind of feedback we were getting a month ago, and we see a big decrease on charge organization requests. As said, there are still things that we can do and we’re working on them, but we see a lot of people, a lot less people requesting for things like this, which is also good news.

Gabriel: I love that metric. mean, because it really is, I guess we are lucky that we have enough users and enough sample size where we can be like, wow, chat organization is a category we can ascribe feedback to. And now it’s like halved or whatever after these features come out, right?

Esteban: Right. Yeah, so something we did for this project that is super interesting, it was fun for me to do was that we have this category, like chat organization, and then we get feedback directly from our users asking for a specific feature. I went and looked into all the feedback that was related to chat organization, and I tried to see why we’re asking for a specific feature. Some of them actually mentioned it, no, I want this so I can do that. And then those needs, I matched them with what type of features will work, even just by naming different types of features. You said that this was sort of favorites or it could be pinning or it could be saved or it could be bookmarked. We also have bookmarks in the browser. So how do we name the feature related to the benefit that I will have and the need that it will solve, but also how much effort will require from the users to actually get the