Inside DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo

Behind the scenes with the DuckDuckGo team — sharing insights on product, engineering, leadership, and AI. insideduckduckgo.substack.com

  1. 10 hr ago

    Duck Tales: The DuckDuckGo Subscription Pro-tier — private AI for AI power users (Ep.41)

    In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Chris (Partnerships) discuss the DuckDuckGo Subscription: the core protections, private AI, and how the new Pro-tier serves AI power users. If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Beah: Hello and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo to discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In this episode, you are going to hear about our Pro subscription plan. And my guest today is Chris Calvi. Chris, do you wanna briefly introduce yourself before we jump in? Chris: I— I would love to. Thank you for having me back. I was on— a quick ad for people who have not listened to the original subscription overview Duck Tales episode. Gabriel and I did that six months— I don’t know, actually probably nine months ago at this point. So go find that. But I’m coming to you from sunny New Jersey. And I’m a member of the partnerships team here at DuckDuckGo. And I’ve been at DuckDuckGo for about five years. I love it here. And most recently helped run efforts to add this new Pro plan to the subscription, which we’ll be talking about on this episode. Beah: Nice. I’d like to think of this episode as the Pro edition of the previous podcast episode that you recorded with Gabriel. Chris: Okay, that’s fair enough. Beah: Just to set the bar. Chris: Yeah. Beah: All right, and I’m Beah, I’m on the product team, if this is your first time meeting me. And yeah, I think we can kind of jump in. Like, let’s start with— can you just explain, Chris, what even is the subscription, what we’re talking about? Chris: Yeah, and I always like to start with, like, why the subscription first, and then I’ll say what the subscription is. So the why: you know, DuckDuckGo has a ton of fully featured, excellent, free-to-use, no-login-required functionality. And we’ve had that for, like, what, fifth— 17 years? How— how long has DuckDuckGo been on? We’ve had it for a very long time. And— and so we, though, realize that there are— there’s extra functionality and features and protections that we would like to offer to— to our users, that you can’t offer— either can offer free, for free, because they have a material c—, like, a substantial cost to us, or it can’t be, like, ad-supported like the search. So— so two years, a little over two years ago, we launched the DuckDuckGo subscription. And— and that includes four protections— that are aligned with what I just mentioned, things that we sort of, like, can offer for free. And so there’s the identity theft restoration, which internally we call IDTR. And that is essentially, if you— Beah: Not me. I call it identity theft restoration because I try to avoid— Chris: You— you don’t like to use acronyms. Beah: I’m anti-acronym, yes. Chris: As a culture, we typically are. Though I like to break the rules. I break the rules. Beah: I continue. Chris: So in the event that your identity is ever— is ever compromised, your n—, your identity stolen and is used, for instance, to open up another credit card— for— that’s not— that you didn’t open, we have a phone number that you can dial into. Actually, let me share my screen and I can show you what I’m talking about. Beah: You can do a live demo of calling a phone number and see what happens. Just don’t do that. Chris: That would be risky. No, I’m just kidding. It would be good, but it would also be boring. So let me know— does this work? Do you see? Beah: I see. Chris: All right, so to get here— after— this is kind of like jumping ahead, but let’s say you have a subscription to DuckDuckGo already, you would log in, you’d— you’d come to your— if you have the app installed, you’d come in and you would select DuckDuckGo subscription. And in subscription settings, if you didn’t already have this device connected to your subscription, you would have to do that as a first step. But once it’s connected, then you have it and you can just come in here and go to the element of the subscription that you want. So let me walk you through those pieces of the subscription. The first one I was mentioning was identity theft restoration. And so what you would do is— in this example I mentioned where somebody opened a credit card in your name, and you’d want to re—, you wanna deal with that, you’d come in here and you would call our— this has some information for you about how it’s gonna go. You will click “talk to an advisor” and then you would make a simple phone call and they would help you make things right with your— your credit card companies, your banks, your credit bureaus, things like that. So that’s identity theft restoration. The— the subscription, as I mentioned, has four key pieces of functionality— we call it four protections in one. The second one is personal information removal. So this would also be available from your— your settings screen. You’d click on here and you’d click “open personal information removal.” And similar to the identity theft restoration, this would bring you to a page where it shows you what— what it’s going to do, what it is and how it’s going to help you and how you get started. And what personal information removal is: in the US, we have this insidious issue where data brokers essentially aggregate personal information about you, about everyone in the country, and they put it on the internet or they— they’ll sell it. Sorry, they’ll put part of it on— on the public web and then sell part of it. And this includes things like your name, your address, your phone number, your date of birth. And even relatives, like— that, like, lived in the household with you. I’m sure you’ve probably seen this if you’ve ever searched for yourself. And so with personal information removal, we go through and we opt you out of the listings on over 60 of those sites. And we’re adding more all the time. And so you would just come in here, you’d click “get started,” and this would ask you a few things, a few pieces of information which stays on your device and does not go to our servers. That’s important to mention here. And then goes through a process that’s run locally from your machine and takes some time. It takes, like, anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks or longer to get you fully removed from all of these sites. So some of the sites can act quicker than others, but this will go through and— and opt you out from being listed on those data broker websites. The— the— and interrupt me with any questions you have about this, any of these functionality, but we went through— Beah: No, this is good, this good. Chris: We went through the identity theft restoration, the second one being personal information removal, and then the third one is the VPN. And the VPN is— stands for, since we don’t like acronyms, virtual private network. And what it— yeah. Beah: I guess I do allow VPN. I’m gonna allow it. Chris: I mean, but— what it— what a VPN is, is it— is it, we set up a— anonymous secure server, and we have them in 30, or over 30, countries around the world. So wherever you’re at, you can connect to the closest one. And— and what it will do is securely— it encrypts your traffic and securely and privately tunnels it through these anonymous servers and then out to the resource that you’re requesting on the other end on the internet. So, like, all of your internet traffic is basically being tunneled through this— this private secure server and then out the other end. And so this— why— what, like, what this does is it protects you in— in— in two— two, like, key ways. One is your ISP, the internet service provider that you’re connected to, won’t be able to see the sites that you are accessing, like what sites you’re visiting. And that helps you because they’re not then able to— either it makes it more difficult for them to censor the content that you can access, and/or build an ad profile about you, for like an advertising profile, and then like resell that, for instance. Beah: Okay. Chris: And then on the other end, it— it protects you— the sites that you are visiting, they’re going to see the IP address, like, kind of like who you are, of the server. And so they don’t actually know who you are unless you were to, like, log in, for instance. So it gives you protection from both— in b—, on both of those cases. But, like, the— the— the use case that is, like, most common for— for the VPN, and I should have switched over to showing you this, is the— is when you’re at, like, a public Wi-Fi location, in an airport or a hotel or, like, a— a coffee shop, you don’t need those— you don’t need them seeing what websites you’re accessing. So VPN gives you that extra security. And I— as I had mentioned, you can change the location that you’re— the server, where the server is. I just keep it on “nearest location” and I’m on it right now. I keep it on all day. I use it all the time. And so I think that’s, like, the key thing about VPNs. I don’t know if the— if I did that justice. Beah: You did. You’re doing such a good— I hate to rush you along, because you’re doing such a good job of explaining these features, but we have to get to the Pro plan. So I think you’re kind of getting to here. Chris: The key thing. Okay, so let me just get you— yes, let me get you that last thing. So the— Beah: Yes. Chris: So the fourth feature is Duck.ai. And Duck.ai is free. But if you want higher limits and be able to do more on it, then— if you hav

    Duck Tales: The DuckDuckGo Subscription Pro-tier — private AI for AI power users (Ep.41)

  2. 29 Jul

    Duck Tales: How we're making it easier to use Duck.ai, our private AI chat. (Ep.40)

    In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Mihai (Design) discuss how the Duck.ai team prioritizes what to build, how we use research and user feedback, and a demo of recent UX updates. If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Beah: Hello, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering approach. And in this particular episode, you’re going to hear from Mihai, who is here to talk about the various UX improvements that we’ve made to Duck.ai recently. Mihai is on the design team. And do you want to just give your give a quick introduction of yourself, Mihai? Mihai: Sure, thank thanks for having me. My name is Mihai. Originally from Moldova, lived across the world in many places, now based in Switzerland, joined DuckDuckGo maybe around three years ago, and I’ve been on the Duck.ai team almost from the very beginning, so I’ve seen the product evolve since then dramatically. So so yeah, we’ll talk about it today. Beah: Nice. Well thanks for joining. For anyone who hasn’t met me, I’m Beah. I’m on the product team here. I’ve been around for a while. So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and ask Mihai some questions about his work on Duck.ai and we’ll just dive on in. So I think I said we’re talking about improving Duck.ai UX, and I’m not sure I said that if you’re not familiar, UX is just a fancy abbreviation for user experience, even though we all know experience doesn’t start with an X. So this means like, you know, making the features that we have and the functionality that we have more usable, tweaking the functionality to better like suit people’s needs and desires, and just make the product more delightful and easier to use. You feel free to amend that definition. But just to kind of like set Mihai: Feel free to amend definition. Beah: the set the tone a little bit, Mihai, tell me a little bit about like how we even decide to work on something. Like how do we prioritize UX user experience changes in Duck.ai land? Mihai: Yeah, as designers, we’re basically I I tend to think of myself as the diplomats that we we try to talk to as many people to get our work done. But we use various signals to inform these decisions. Some of some of them are more perfect, some of them are imperfect. There’s no There’s no reality where we’re working with perfect information. So sometimes we form assumptions, sometimes we rely on research. User feedback, internal feedback. Sometimes we have strategic bets that we place as an organization. We have dashboards with metrics. We have just no we know the competitive gaps that we have, and sometimes we just rely on instinct. So we Beah: That’s good. Mihai: we bundle all of these together in our decision-making process. Some of these signals they surface a problem, Beah: Yeah. Mihai: others validate the direction and it’s on us to use our own human judgment to determine the right trade-off for for these things. And in the end it narrows down to to looking at where the biggest overlap is with the user problems that we have and where we’re taking the product. Beah: Yeah, or do all the hand and just then follow it. Mihai: Yeah, maybe this is more kind of like general response, but no one decision was the same. Beah: Yeah, right once. Yeah, yeah. Mihai: So it’s it’s it’s all based on experienced people in the room making the the calls based on the information that we have. Beah: Yeah, I mean one thing that I’m guessing people I I bet a lot of people would underestimate the degree to which we’re obsessed with user feedback. Like you can’t completely rely on user feedback to tell you how to build a product because, you know, hopefully the people building the product have additional insights about what’s possible and what good looks like that users can’t articulate or shouldn’t take the time to articulate. It’s not on them. But that aside, like we obsess pretty hard on feedback. Like we read an insane amount of feedback. We have systems for categorizing it and making sense of it. I mean, I’ve been caught up in like long discussions where we are really deeply trying to interpret a comment somebody made on Reddit or in the app store and like try to figure out the best way to address it. And so I’m just pointing that out because I think that might not be obvious. Like I think there’s probably a lot of, you know, for a tech company that serves millions and millions of users, I’m not sure that’s I’m guessing that’s not the norm. So that is a big part of it. But then like beyond that, you know, there’s a bunch of other signals we use, like Mihai said, and I know in Duck.ai on that team, like you guys have a rubric, right, that you’re using to actually like evaluate in a structured way a bunch of project ideas and feedback is one of the inputs to that rubric, but there are others as well. So also very maybe distinctive of DuckDuckGo is I think it’s a hyper structured and rational decision making process. Would you agree with that, Mihai? Mihai: Yeah. It’s it’s quite unique and I think the the great thing is that a bunch of us, everyone here, they’re scoping their own projects, they have their own ideas, they uncover different things that they’re pitching in and that goes into that rubric. And at certain times we those categories of how how we score the rubric, they’re weighted. So sometimes certain elements are more important than the others. And that help us kind of look at what what’s important to us right now and what we’re getting from the users and all the projects that are strong candidates for us to tackle tackle in the next roadmap, for example. Beah: Cool. Yeah, so let’s talk about something that did bubble to the top recently. Like, can you give me an example of an a UX improvement that you’ve worked on? Mihai: Yes, so the first example is dictation. I’ll share my screen real quick. Cool, so this is our interface here. So users keep asking for dictation features, so it’s this microphone in the input field. There’s certain people that for them is they would use the input field. They’ll rather talk than type. It’s either a prompt is really long, or you they just want to do it hands free. And shipping this was actually great because it it got us in line with the competitors as well. But internally we we were kind of i it it was the group was split in terms of like if we wanna do it until that user feedback kept coming back, kept coming back. And we decided to to pull the trigger. For from the UX standpoint, what was exciting for me personally is voice interfaces, they have a big affordance problem. That it’s really hard sometimes to know what’s the system status for that and to avoid the jargon is basically you need to know what the what the app is doing at any point in time. And that was an interesting challenge on top of just delivering the feature. And if I if I trigger it, we we do three things here. We label things clearly for people to know what’s going on. You also get a visual cue, this waveform that provides feedback, and as you see me pause, that waveform reacts to my voice, but also the input field has changed its its shape not the height or anything but what’s inside it now is geared toward towards a different input which is not text and we’ve added this nice glow animation to it which is which is really cool so and then it’s trust transcribing and giving back the the text. Another one should should I should I give a few more? Alright. Beah: Nice. Beah: Yeah, yeah. Give me another example, please. That’s good. Mihai: Alright. Another one is batch deletion, which is another feature that was requested by by users. This one is a little different because our we’re famous for our fire button. You you can basically burn all your data and stuff like that. But in Duck.ai specifically we had the reality that you could either delete one chat at a time or all of them. And nothing nothing in between. And we we decided to that we need to give people more precise control. To do it in just one step. Whenever you have 30 chats, for example, and you just want to delete seven at a time, it’s quite annoying to go one by one. So this one, it’s not groundbreaking or anything. It’s been a pattern on the web for quite some time. How you can batch select the different things. This is a great example, thinking back to the signals that we spoke. It’s a great example when you need to know where to follow the process for something when whenever you’re designing something that’s more unknown and whenever you need to trust your instincts more. And this is a project that was basically that where we we used our experience more and the project was short this was delivered and and shipped quite quickly because of that. And what the feature does you can go in and select many chats you want to delete. We have different entry points to how to do it. Usually Beah: Yeah. Mihai: we know people click the fire button to open it so we surface a button there for people to actually not delete everything but select multiple ones or for maybe power users whenever something’s selected you can shift click and enter this mode and delete delete your chats. So yeah, this one the reason I’m I’m asking is we spoke about all these signals and how complex things are, but this one was th three designers, we got in the room, we did a thirty minute thing, then I spent maybe two hours on it on edge cases, we put it to review to a wider gr

    Duck Tales: How we're making it easier to use Duck.ai, our private AI chat. (Ep.40)

  3. 22 Jul

    Duck Tales: How we use mental models and operational defaults to improve decision making (Ep.39)

    In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Marc (VP, Engineering) discuss how we create, communicate, and challenge operational defaults to make better decisions at speed. If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Beah: Hello and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, the technology, and the people who help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Today, you are going to hear about how we work, I guess, or one facet of how we work, which is using operational defaults and I have with me Marc, who is going to who I’m going to interview about operational defaults. Marc, do you wanna introduce yourself? Marc: Yeah. Marc, I’m on the engineering team at DuckDuckGo. Beah: Okay. That’s about all you need to know. and I’m Beah, I’m on the product team if if you haven’t seen me before. okay, cool. Well let’s jump in. What even is an operational default? Marc: Yeah. Yeah, so defaults are I would say a deceptively simple concept. at at DuckDuckGo we’re always trying to leverage mental models to help us move more quickly and think more clearly and and things of that nature. in that context, the default effect is seen as a negative, right? And and I think we’ve all seen that in apps and in different places. Here we’re trying to leverage the the upside of that, where we’re basically taking any decision that you can make ahead of time that generally is true or has a right answer eighty percent of the time, we’re gonna call that a default. for that other twenty percent, we wanna leave room for our folks to be able to make exceptions, ideally very thoughtful exceptions. Beah: When you say default is a negative in the app, you mean like, you know, if you get an Android phone and the default browser is Chrome and the default search engine is Google and it’s really hard for another player like DuckDuckGo to to break through th those defaults. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. Marc: yeah, exactly. There’s there’s in Gabe’s book of mental models there’s the default effect and again it’s generally negative, but like I said, in this case we’re trying to use defaults as as something that we can leverage to help us go quicker. Beah: Yeah, yeah. So how is that how is it different than a rule? Marc: I mean it’s conceptually the same thing. I think rules are just more binary, right? Like this is something you do or you don’t do pretty much all the time. Where here we’re saying that these are things that are generally true. Like I said, eighty percent of the time is just the number that we made up. and that allows people to potentially make faster decisions. but we also want to include encourage people to think about what they’re doing and not just go on autopilot. And I think that’s the danger of catching something as a rule is that yeah, people will just kind of blindly follow it by default. Beah: Yeah, yeah. I think that distinction is super important. Like, first of all, there are a lot of things where rules just have exceptions and therefore they’re not really good rules, you know? like you have to be pretty sure that there has to be a really good reason to make something a rule because it’s going to fit different situations differently. And yeah, it’s like once it becomes a rule, people like lose power to do anything differently, so they don’t think about it, they don’t feel empowered, and like with a default, there’s still a burden of judgment because you can overturn the default and choose a different path. but the idea, I think, would you care would you say this is a fair characterization is like A, don’t spend brain power thinking about like reinventing the wheel or thinking about something that doesn’t really warrant brain power, like there’s a good default, and B you know just to n to nudge people in the direction of the best average answer, you know. Marc: Yeah, right. It’s leveraging decisions that we’ve deliberated over in the past and you know have come to a good decision on. and exactly what you said. We don’t want folks reinventing the wheel. That said, we do want I mean, we hire really smart people at DuckDuckGo and we wanna, you know, leverage and celebrate that. So yeah, everybody’s encouraged to challenge the norm, so to speak, or you know, pre existing defaults. And in fact that’s a big big part of this. whole concept is coming back and challenging these at times. But yeah, th they’re, you know, i in a lot of cases it’s it would just be wasted effort to be rethinking this from scratch. And as much as there are some that are that are rule or that you know might make better rules because they are more binary, there are others that really don’t make great defaults either. we had a decent example where it was like, yeah, there is something that was true, say fifty percent of the time. I don’t remember what the actual number was, but it just didn’t make a great default. I honestly don’t remember what it is, but yeah, d just to say that not everything c falls into that framework framework. Beah: Yeah, that that’s a good segue. Yeah. T t give me some examples of things that we do think are good operational defaults or that we treat as such. Marc: Sure, yeah. I mean we have a bunch I you know, one of the things that’s so powerful about this is that I think we all do this all the time. so for example at DuckDuckGo we try to prioritize quick wins, which I guess the other thing I should say about defaults is that they are somewhat self evident, like to the point where that’s why I said they’re kind of deceptively simple because there are things that you don’t necessarily feel like you should have to put a lot of time into, a a lot of thought into. But quick wins are one where, you know, we at the company we’ve been, you know, trying to push people toward that. Right. Like the idea of a quick win is something that is relatively low effort but has high impact. And I mean you would saying it out loud, you would say, of course that’s something we should prioritize. But I think it’s also important to acknowledge that people don’t think that way. instinctually in a lot of cases. They wanna sometimes they want to work on, you know, the hardest thing or what they see as the most impact when, yeah, maybe less would do. so that’s one. one of my favorite ones, and I think a lot of people at this company would agree is we do no meetings on Wednesdays. so that’s a very simple one that, yeah, you we we don’t I I I w wouldn’t call it a rule, whereas we don’t you know, you can have a meeting on a Wednesday and sometimes you have to, especially as if it’s with somebody external. But generally you shouldn’t be scheduling meetings on Wednesdays. Beah: See, that’s interesting because I would have called that one a rule. We I specifically I would have called the rule no Marc: I mean Beah: If you want to hop on real time and talk to somebody internally about something as it comes up, fine. If you have like an external call, we’ve also accepted that. But I I try to enforce that one as a rule because I think that one, if it’s a default, people just don’t observe it. They break it way too much. That’s my opinion. Marc: Well, I yeah, but I think you just gave a few exceptions that are good, right? Like I I’m not gonna necessarily schedule something ahead of time, but I will yeah, reach out to somebody and say, Hey, it would be quicker if we talked about this ad hoc. So maybe I mean, yeah, maybe it’s splitting hairs, but Beah: Yeah, it’s interesting though, because I think of those as part of as like the rule is constrained. So I guess making a rule is is safer the more you constrain it. And you could you could arguably ha tackle one operational problem and either make a highly constrained rule that has exceptions and carve outs or a broader default and maybe sometimes both at the same time. So yeah, okay. All right, that’s a good one. give me you got another example. Marc: Yeah, fair enough. Sure. Sure. Yeah, I I can give you another one. so this one we came up with recently and that’s working incrementally, which again, you would say and when I say work incrementally, I basically mean you know we’re we’re trying to ship smaller features more frequently or even larger features and smaller increments. you’re going back and you’re you know, making sure that you’re on the right track, etc. Which again sounds like obviously that’s something that you would want to do. But anyone who’s ever collaborated with anyone on anything, I think would would realize that, yeah, that’s I don’t think that’s a human default, right? Like I think we all, you know, want to have a task, go build whatever we’re supposed to build, and then show the awesome thing that we did. And yeah, that’s I think that’s a good instinct to have. But there are many cases where if you misunderstood something initially or new information pops up, yeah, it’s super important to make sure that you’re raising that up and collaborating with others on Beah: Mm-hmm. So you s you said that we made that one recently. Like what does it mean to make an operational default? How do we codify or communicate these? Marc: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I don’t think we’ve actually figured that out yet. We have a lot of defaults across the company. This one was was communicated to to several objectives. but yeah, it’s not I would say it’s written down, but it’s not there’s no like internal glossary or internal dire

    Duck Tales: How we use mental models and operational defaults to improve decision making (Ep.39)

  4. 15 Jul

    Duck Tales: Our first major Duck.ai ad, and how we develop creative at DuckDuckGo (Ep.38)

    In this episode, Cristina (CMO) and Zack (Senior Director, Marketing) discuss our new Duck.ai ad, how we develop, test, and measure creative and campaigns, and why we do a lot of the work in-house. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com. Cristina: Hi, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Hi, I’m Cristina. I’m on the marketing team, and I’m here today with Zack. Do you want to introduce yourself? Zack: Yeah, my name is Zack Einhorn. I’m on the marketing team as well at DuckDuckGo and been here for nine years now. and I live in LA. Happy to be here. Cristina: Happy to have you, thanks for joining. So today we’re gonna talk about our new ad campaign. On June 29th, we launched Prying Eyes, the name of our first national brand campaign for Duck.ai. And for those of you who don’t know what Duck.ai is, it is a way to chat privately with ChatGPT and other AIs, all in one place for free, no login. So today we’re gonna go behind the scenes, how it came together. Our unique development and production process, our views on AI, and more. Before we jump in, I just want to say to everyone listening: love it, hate it, have ideas for a new episode, please write us at podcast@duckduckgo.com. That’s podcast@duckduckgo.com. We will read all of them and would appreciate any feedback. So, first question: Zack, why why a brand campaign for Duck.ai and why now? Zack: Yeah, well, you know, for years we had been focused on you know performance marketing for as an alternative to Google and Chrome and focusing on search and browse. And we’re introducing a new product market that has virtually zero awareness. And we’re really confident about the product market fit. We know that there’s a lot of built-up anxiety around AI and a desire for private alternatives. And so we know it’s time to let people know that one exists and from a company that you trust and have been trusting. Cristina: So I find that when I chat with people about what I do, they think the the making the ad portion of my work is the most interesting, right? And they’ll ask, like what is it like to be on set and all these kind of things? So I think a lot of people find that industry but interesting. But even for industry veterans, it’s maybe interesting to hear about how we at DuckDuckGo make an ad, because it’s a different bit different than how most companies do it. Can you dive into that? Zack: Yeah, absolutely. so you know, most companies, and in my in my experience, the prior companies, you know, they kind of hand everything over to one agency. You know, everything is sort of with one big house strategy, research, testing. and the way that we do it is a little bit different. Like you said, we’re we tend to we like to be really hands on. and I think, you know, one thing that makes us pretty different too is that, you know, we’re we you know we’re some of like the foremost researchers on this space at the company. And so we you know, whereas it might be really useful if you’re in like a you know a a a category, like you know, consumer package goods, to have like the expertise of an agency that may have many, many clients in that space and can and can, you know, give you strategy and insight into areas that you may not have. but because we really you know, we have a lot of that research and talent in house, the strategy really you know comes from us. and you know, we tend to lean on agencies more for like additional initial ideation. and then from there we really take things into our own hands. We have we have freelancers that we’ve gone back to a handful of times to help us develop ideas. We’ve got internal talent that helps us develop ideas. and then we have production companies that we work directly with. And that I think is a real for us. You know, we we save a lot of, I think, you know, we save a lot of time in the game of telephone that you usually play with your with your agency by being able to, you know, handpick the director, be you know deeply involved in the post-production, like attending edit sessions, coloring. and I think that that gives us a advantage because you know not only do we get to accelerate by making those being hands-on in those choices, but we also continuously build those skill sets. And so you know we’ve been doing it now, we’ve been doing it this way and kind of building on that process for five years now. And we’ve just we’ve built up a a a ton of expertise internally and done a lot of hot like you know, a lot of good hiring to fill the the areas of expertise that we didn’t have, expanded our network of partners. yeah, we’ve really kind of built up this this in-house team. Cristina: Yeah, thanks for walking us through that. So internally, the team has been calling this ad Prying Eyes. Like, what does that mean? Where did the idea come from? Zack: Yeah, absolutely. So it came from one of our one of our agency partners. You know, we we’d we went through a process where you know we realized one of the things that we weren’t super strong at internally was coming up with the initial idea. and so we ran through a process where we worked with a series of agencies and freelancers to to come up with ideas. One of them came up with this idea that was really sticking with us where we had you know giant photorealistic eyeballs following you know c following people and and you know in you know invading their space when they’re doing asking AI sensitive questions. And we had a few directions we were looking at, and we had done a bunch of research. And the thing that we kept coming back to was this thing we called exposure anxiety. And the crux of it was that we realized that when we got a level down into the specific things that people were worried about being spied on. you know, giving away when they’re when they’re using AI, that it became like a bit polarizing. Like, you know, they once you used a specific example, people are like, well that’s not quite really me. But we found the thing that really stuck for everyone, and that was the most visceral thing, which I think is the most important because I think that’s what sticks with you it emotionally in an ad and will make you think of it later and motivate you, was just the actual sensation of of being watched. That was the through line that whether you were worried about, you know, asking AI about something related to, you know, health, or whether you were asking about an issue going on at work, or you know, whether you’re asking AI you know for symptoms of, you know, something that your that your kids dealing with, that that no matter what it was, everyone shared this this this feeling of exposure anxiety and you know what what can make you you know what is more exposing than feeling like there are giant eyes behind you watching everything that you that you type. Cristina: Yeah, this was this was a fun concept. you know, we considered a lot of different ideas, and for me, just seeing and thinking about the eyeballs was just so arresting, right? In a really clear visual way to encompass the feelings that we had heard in research, right? We’re a very data-driven company, and so research is really important to us. We’re not just thinking of something that looks cool, it needs to be grounded in an insight that we think relates back to the problem we’re trying to solve. Zack: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also just there was a lot of connectivity to to like our overall message, too, like, you know, in in terms of of privacy and and and prior campaigns. I think that we, when we went in, I think we really thought we want something that is uniquely AI. but I think what we found is that a lot of the anxiety around AI is kind of an evolution of the of the anxiety that already existed. So just like the way, just the way that AI is the newest way that people are are using the internet and and how it’s you know it’s more personalized and you know tailored than than than search and browse was it’s also that much more viscerally you know uncomfortable you know you’re you’re a lot more you know, likely to have sort of these uncanny experiences where, you know, AI will bring up a prior conversation or mention a tidbit that you thought, you know, wasn’t being logged, you know. and and so I think it really helped draw that draw that through line. Cristina: Yeah. Yeah, I I personally feel very passionate that if someone is going to use AI, they should use Duck.ai because it’s hard to anticipate just how this data will be used from other companies in the future. But I think we can all anticipate, probably not in a great way, right? In terms of privacy. On the last episode I was on, we talked about how not everybody wants AI, right? And that’s why we feel so strongly about making it optional. So how do you think about making an ad for AI? Zack: Yeah, I mean I think that’s a very real subset of people. I look at, you know, the way that I look at DuckDuckGo’s mission is, you know, I think we, you know, I look at the goal of DuckDuckGo to provide for people the the best quality possible version of the internet that you are used to using, but private. And so I think, you know, that is the that is the the the mass of people that we saw that that we that we serve. AI adoption is, you know, well over fifty percent and growing. And so I think you know it’s really important that we serve that audience. at the same time, you know, we firm

    Duck Tales: Our first major Duck.ai ad, and how we develop creative at DuckDuckGo (Ep.38)

  5. 8 Jul

    Duck Tales: The DuckDuckGo browser now blocks ads on YouTube videos, so you can watch without interruption (Ep.37)

    In this episode, Peter (Product) and Dave (Privacy) discuss YouTube Ad Blocking, why we built it, how it works, and how it differs from Duck Player. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com. Show notes: Ad Blocking is enabled by default for Mac, iOS and Windows browsers. It will be enabled by default for Android soon, but for now can be turned on in settings. Peter: Hello everyone and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo, we discuss the stories, technology, and the people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each of these episodes, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or things like approaches to AI. My name is Peter. I’m on the product team at DuckDuckGo, and I’m joined with my colleague Dave. Dave, do you want to introduce yourself? Dave: Sure. Yeah. Hey, I’m Dave. I generally work on the browser experience at DuckDuckGo. That means working on privacy protections, working on making sure that websites work the way that you expect them to work and yeah, making sure that you have a good experience browsing the web. Peter: Awesome. And today we’re gonna be talking about ad blocking, more specifically YouTube ad blocking, but I think we’re gonna talk also just generally about about ad blocking. So Dave, why don’t we why don’t we start at the top? Does DuckDuckGo browser block ads today? Dave: If if you’ve used one of our browsers, you’ve probably noticed that you see quite a few fewer ads. So that’s a side effect of our tracker blocking. So the reason that you’re seeing fewer ads is a lot of these ads come with trackers, you know. They want to see how you interact with the ad. They want more info about you to determine, you know, is that like a a good impression? And you know, they want to build these profiles and all of that. So we block those requests before they’re initiated. And that leads to many fewer ads across the web. But we don’t deploy a like a specific ad blocking feature. Peter: Mm-hmm. Peter: Got it. And so we what what you’re basically saying is a lot of these companies that, you know, serve up advertising are also tracking the heck out of people. And so by by virtue of the fact that we block that tracking, we are basically blocking you know a lot of the advertisements on the internet. Dave: That’s right. That’s right. Peter: Makes sense. And so what’s changing about our ad blocking? Dave: Yeah, so what we’re doing here, and as Peter said, we we’re starting with YouTube. We r have received a ton of user feedback asking for us to do something about this. As as you probably know, YouTube shows up to you know several minutes of ads before videos, during videos, just constantly. And what what’s changing here is we have deployed we’re working on deploying a feature that will just prevent these ads from loading. So instead of, you know, waiting thirty to seconds to a minute before you can watch a video and then getting interrupted in the middle of a video, you should be able to watch the video right away and without interruptions. Peter: Yeah, and so a a lot of you’re saying a lot of our users have been asking for the ability to block ads on on YouTube. I think it’s safe to say that, you know, a lot of DuckDuckGo search users who historically have used other browsers, have have used extensions, ad block extensions to get this benefit. And so Dave, you’re saying a lot of these users have asked us for the similar sort of capability in our browsers. Dave: Yeah, that’s right. Extensions are a very powerful tool. We don’t export extensions in our browsers for for good reason. So they can be a blessing and a curse. If if you’re using the right extensions, there are safe extensions and they can improve your browsing experience by like you know blocking ads or you know auto-filling password fields, that kind of stuff. But they’re also a a really large risk because there are a lot of malicious extensions out there and unscrupulous extensions out there that can you know get full access to everything within the web pages that you’re looking at and exfiltrate your data and track what you’re doing online without you even realizing. Peter: Mm-hmm. Peter: Yeah, I I remember over the last few years, every few months there seems to be a story about some extension that that a lot of people installed that either went rogue or maybe got sold to another company and then they use that extension to to data mine people and spy on their their online browsing behavior overall. And so you’re you’re basically saying, Dave, by adding this capability, the YouTube ad blocking natively to our browser applications. Not only is it easy for our users to enable and get that benefit, but it is also safe to do so. Is that right? Dave: That’s exactly right. Peter: Awesome. Cool. And so we built this based on user demand. But a lot of our browser users already have the benefit of something we call Duck Player. Can you explain what Duck Player is and then let’s talk about how Duck Player differs from the YouTube ad blocking that we’re talking about? Dave: Yeah, totally. So Duck Player, we like to think about it as kind of a theater mode. So if you visit YouTube or you load a YouTube link, you can load it in this kind of standalone window within our browsers that we call Duck Player. And what what’s happening there is we’re loading it through this separate YouTube no cookie domain. And and the advantage of what we’re doing there is that it doesn’t like when you watch videos, they’re they’re not tied to your account and it they won’t influence your viewing history or your, you know, recommended videos. But over time we’ve we’ve seen quite a bit of feedback from users about issues that they’ve run into with Duck Player and that that have made them go back and watch videos on YouTube’s main page. So I can go into this a a little bit here. So quite often, I guess all the time, when when a when a content creator uploads a video to YouTube, they can decide whether they want that video to be viewable on YouTube or whether they want it to be able to be embedded on other sites. So if they say, no, we don’t want this to be embedded on other sites, that makes it so it also can’t be watched in Duck Player. And there are a couple other edge cases here that prevent users from watching videos in in Duck Player. So if there’s an age restriction on a video that you have to sign in to your YouTube account in order to watch the video, that means you also can’t watch it there. And you know th they’re there a variety of issues that we’ve run into or heard from heard about from users. Peter: That makes sense. Yeah, I I think I think it’s safe to say that our our users love Duck Player. A. We we’ve heard from a lot of users that it’s it’s a killer feature that they they use all the time. But as as you said, yeah, between people who do want sometimes they want to see the full full comments and things like that that you’re not gonna get in Duck Player, they want to see those on YouTube, but they also want to benefit from the the ad free experience. That’s part of the reason we built the YouTube ad blocking and to to avoid some of the error messages that you referred to, which tend to come up pretty often, particularly on on desktop browsers, the error where video cannot be watched because a content creator disallowed it from being watched outside of YouTube. It comes up a couple percent of the time overall. So with this new YouTube ad blocking, it should be a little bit more seamless for everybody. Cool. Dave: Yeah, and I I just want to make it clear that Duck Player’s not going anywhere. That that still exists. You can still choose to use it. We’re just creating more optionality here. Peter: Awesome. And and that means that anyone who’s currently setting Duck Player to always load videos in Duck Player, they should continue to have that experience as their default, right? Dave: That’s right. Peter: That’s great. Talk talk a little bit about building out the YouTube ad blocking capabilities. What what were any main challenges we hit along the way? Dave: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so as you know, we have a we have a browser on four different platforms, Android, iOS, Mac OS, and Windows. Slightly different architecture on each platform. Websites literally differently between, you know, they they often have like a mobile version and a desktop version. So it can be a challenge to ship parity across all all platforms. I think the the trickiest part about building ad blocking for YouTube is it’s it’s not just a simple block this request and ads won’t load. I think you know YouTube and other large websites are incentivized to prevent users from ad from blocking their ads, which means they make it a a little bit more challenging to work around that. So what we’re doing here is, you know, we we are blocking a few requests, but we’re also injecting several different scripts into the page that kind of you know rearrange how the ad calls load into the videos. Peter: Hmm. And and if if you our users who are using the new capability, if they if they see issues come up through their use of it, is there a way that they can tell us about that? Dave: Yeah, that’s a good point. Absolutely. Please, if you run into any issues using this new feature, you can either submit browser feedback, which is through through the settings page. We also offer a more direct way to submit feedback about a problem you’re experiencing with a specific site. We call it a a broken site report. You can access that through the privacy dashbo

    Duck Tales: The DuckDuckGo browser now blocks ads on YouTube videos, so you can watch without interruption (Ep.37)

  6. 1 Jul

    Duck Tales: AI in the DuckDuckGo browser — private, useful & optional (Ep.36)

    In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Aitor (Engineering) discuss AI in the DuckDuckGo browser, including how we’re integrating Duck.ai, our private AI chat. Plus, why it’s important we make AI not just easy to access, but easy to dial down or turn off entirely. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com Beah: Hello, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, the technology, and the people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Today you’re going to hear about our approach to AI in the browser at DuckDuckGo. So we have—we have four browsers. Or we have a browser for four platforms, Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. And I have with me to talk about this topic today about how we have integrated AI into those browsers, Aitor. Aitor, would you like to introduce yourself briefly? Aitor: Sure. Yeah, so my name is Aitor. I’m originally Spanish, currently living in Portugal. Been in DuckDuckGo for, I don’t know, five years, something like that. I don’t remember anymore. Started as an—as an Android engineer and now I’m leading with other folks what we call the objective for our AI browser integrations, which is what Beah just presented. Beah: Yep. Awesome. And yes, if—if we—if you haven’t met me before, I’m Beah, I’m on the product team at DuckDuckGo. Before we jump in, I have a bunch of questions for Aitor. But before we jump into the questions, I just want to say this is a PSA to the audience. We’ve been running Duck Tales for, I think, a bit over six months now, and have a pretty good following on Substack, and we’d love to hear from the listeners more. Aitor: Okay. Beah: So if you have feedback about what you like, what you don’t like, what topics you’d like to hear more about, send us a note at podcast@duckduckgo.com with your feedback. We’ll also put that address in the show notes. But please, we’d really love to hear from you. So okay, with that said, maybe just a quick kind of introduction to how we’re approaching AI in general at DuckDuckGo before we get into the—the details of how we put it into the—the browser. Since we started adding AI features to our products, we’ve had this like three-prong value system that AI be private, useful, and optional. So I think those are like—private’s probably pretty self-explanatory if you’re listening to this podcast anyway. Useful meaning like not AI for AI’s sake, but actually like solving a meaningful problem for users. And then optional is also maybe deserves a little explanation. Like you can turn AI off in all of our products. So you know there’s an incredible spectrum of opinions about AI and when to use it and how much to use it that ranges from never to all the time and everywhere in between. And we put a lot of care into giving users the like toggles and controls they need to customize their level of interaction with AI. Whatever you choose there, it will always be private. So that’s like a—just a little bit of groundwork. But Aitor, can you tell me a little bit about like how that—how we’ve integrated AI into the browsers and maybe a demo would be in order too. Aitor: Yeah, let’s just do—let’s just try to share—this is where everything goes wrong now. Let’s just try to say how our AI integration looks like in production right now. Let me share my phone. Okay, so can you—can you see that? Beah: Sure. It can. Aitor: So this is how people would basically see our browser whenever they—they open it. In here you have like some favorites. It’s just for—for display. So the way that we’ve integrated AI in the browser right now is through this toggle, as we call it internally. You see above—search and Duck.ai. What we want is to give like a very quick access to search, a very quick access to Duck.ai, and—and a very easy switch between them. So in here, users could start a search or a browse. Similarly they can just switch the toggle or flip the toggle to the other side and they would see basically our integration with chats. You see here there is a bunch of chats, different icons to show whether it’s a voice chat or a text chat. We also want to have this marriage between chats and—and browsing and we’ll get—probably a little bit more into details later. So at the bottom, if you didn’t want to chat, you have like an easy access again to browser—to search. You can access one chat right from here. Then basically we display our Duck.ai chat. And from here you can just continue chatting from here. This is in Spanish, sorry, or you can just access—or your history or you can create a new one. So this is basically how— Beah: That looks like a testing history if ever I’ve seen one. Aitor: Yeah. So this is basically how—how it looks like in production. It will change very, very soon. So we are gonna ship like a—this is like a good experience, but we are gonna improve it like even further. And yeah, in here related to privacy, like you can just like delete your chats for good, you can rename it and this is like our fire button, which if you are a user you should know about it. The context of—of a chat, you can just basically delete a chat and discuss with our privacy story as well. So this is like a very— Beah: Yeah, I love that. I love the chat level delete. Like I—like I don’t—I don’t use the app level fire button hardly ever ‘cause like I want some amount of memory, but I have like a bunch of like quick throwaway chats like all the time and it’s so satisfying to get them out of my like history list, yeah. Yeah. Hey, you mind going back to the toggle—sorry, Aitor. Aitor: Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Yeah, I’m also like a heavy user of this one. Yeah, cool. No, no, I—I was saying that I’m—I’m kinda like the same user. Like I don’t generally use the button to just clear everything. I’m more surgical. So I love the fact that—that this is the integration and experience that we have—that we’ve created for chats. Beah: Yeah. Do you mind going back to the toggle view? I just wanted to like the search or Duck.ai input. So like when you were—yeah, if you go to the Duck.ai side, just to be totally clear, like those are historical chats. So we—so the auto complete is filling—like if you wanted to revisit a chat and if you start typing it’ll filter. So if you have like a very long history list, it’s an easy way to get to—yeah. Aitor: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. This is the chat history—similar to—it resembles basically the experience of search, although it’s like slightly different. It’s only about chats. And—and yes, as soon as you start typing, it starts autocompleting the ones that they are more relevant to—to your—to your—to your text. There’s a bunch of—of things that we are doing around improving the—the—the searching capabilities. So that it’s not only by title, but it’s like—I don’t know, if you don’t quite remember the exact words of your chat, basically we still wanna present with that option, right? So there’s like a bunch of work as well going on in that direction. Beah: Yeah, it’s interesting. Like it—well, I think one of the s—central product challenges here is like chat is not entirely analogous to search or browse in that you—you know, you pro—you don’t want to like continue a search. I mean you might like branch off from a search, but like what—you know, an old search is an old search. A chat you might want to like revisit a chat to continue. It’s like a living thing that you wanna continue. And so that’s created some interesting, like—we’re—we’re sort of trying to make these parallel worlds that will feel familiar to some extent. Aitor: That’s fine. Exactly. Beah: Good thing. I can’t read Portuguese, huh? Or Spanish. Okay, no. I saw the heart though, that was nice. Yeah. We can edit that out and post if you want. Very good. Good, ‘cause I like it. Yeah. Cool. Do you mind—Aitor, there’s like another—do you want to just show the sort of—if you’re on a website, like how to—how to start a search or a chat? Aitor: I know, that’s totally fine. Set, live demo, if things happen. Yeah, so if we go to like a—a website, in here what—what the users can do to quickly go into—into chat is there is this little CTA, this little icon here where users just can tap it and this pops up this sheet that allows the user to chat with the context of—chat about the context of—of the page that they are browsing if they want to. This is what this means basically here. This means that the context of this particular page is attached. You see like BBC Home, that card in there. User can remove it if they just want to chat about something generic that doesn’t really have to do with—with a page. And you can reattach it if you want. And then we have like quick accesses here that says summarize this page. So if the user clicks on it and then submits, you should just get like a summary of—of the page that you were browsing. So this is the Gombia. Beah: Thanks. No, I just said nice. Go ahead. Aitor: So this is the quickest way that you can get into—into chat once you are like in search or browsing. From here you can do different things. You can continue chatting about—about the context of the page or any—or anything else really. You can expand this, this—this button basically. So if you wanna bring this into kind of like the full experience that you saw before, so you can just go there. And your chat is of course alwa

    Duck Tales: AI in the DuckDuckGo browser — private, useful & optional (Ep.36)

  7. 24 Jun

    Duck Tales: AI optionality, and why DuckDuckGo installs are up ~40% since Google swapped search for AI mode (Ep.35)

    In this episode, Cristina (Chief Marketing Officer) and Kamyl (Chief Comms & Public Affairs Officer) discuss the AI announcements of Google I/O, our response, and how our long-term stance on AI optionality led to rapid and record growth. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com Cristina: Hi, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. We’ve been running Duck Tales for over six months now and have a strong and engaged following on Substack, especially. We’d love to get your feedback. What do you like or dislike about Duck Tales? What topics would you like to hear more about? Is there anything you’d like us to go deeper on? You can write to us at podcast at duckduckgo.com. That’s podcast at duckduckgo.com with suggestions. We will read all of them. And you can find our email in the show notes too. So with that said, hi, I’m Cristina. I’m on the marketing team. And today I’m here with Kamyl, who leads our communications and public affairs teams. And we’re gonna interview each other today. Kamyl, do you wanna say hi or anything else? Kamyl: Ha ha. Greetings everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Cristina, I’m really excited to talk about our topic today with you. Cristina: Awesome. Okay, so to jump in, DuckDuckGo has always been known for privacy, but lately we’ve been talking a lot about AI choice. How did private, useful, and optional become the lens we put on AI? Kamyl: So I remember when ChatGPT first launched and I was talking to Gabriel a little bit about, you know, how do we think this is going to show up in DuckDuckGo? And I think one of the things that makes working here at DuckDuckGo really fun and different is that we get the freedom to think a little differently, and to say if everyone is doing one thing, how can we do it a little different. How can we think about AI in a way that’s uniquely DuckDuckGo? And that’s how we landed on private, useful, and optional. Private, what most people know about DuckDuckGo, we’ve always respected our users’ privacy, never collect search histories, anything like that. And we do the same with AI. Useful in that we never wanted to just launch an AI feature. Because it’s AI, but it actually had to do something helpful. It had to do something to improve the search experience or the browsing experience. And then optional, knowing that there are many people out there with many different opinions about AI, and opinions are still forming. Some people want the ability to use it to the their most its most extent. And some people don’t want to see it at all. And that, you know, because of a lot of big tech investments in a in a in AI like Google, they aren’t willing to necessarily just give AI a straight up off button. So we knew that those were things that we could do uniquely, put them together and then that became our lens. Cristina: So because we are in this optional standpoint, we offer a no AI experience, we also offer things like Search Assist and Duck.ai. How do you respond to folks who might say that offering this range is contradictory? Kamyl: Right. You know, I think it’s part of the it’s a major part of our goal at DuckDuckGo to let people use the internet how they wanna do it, but more privately and without trade-offs. And so some people want to use the internet with AI and some people want to use it without AI. And so to us, giving people a way to do whatever they want in a more private way without trade-offs feels really core to our mission. And so it’s not contradictory. We don’t have to have sort of one binary stance on it. We have to think about who our users are and what they want. And instead of forcing them into one experience, we think it’s the right thing to do to let them choose. Cristina: Got it. So for you and I and the team, it’s been a very busy, very exciting few weeks. Yes. And this all started at the Google I/O conference. Can you tell us what was that and why did it have an impact on us? Kamyl: Indeed it has. Yes. So Google I/O happens every year. It’s their developers conference and they announce you know, a extremely long laundry list of new features and products and things that they are excited about. And at the top of that list were changes to core Google search. Essentially that they were going to turn it and are in the process of turning it into a more AI forward experience that is turning the search bar into an AI chat bar. And essentially the moment that that happened we saw organic conversations about it explode over the internet. Why is Google doing this? They’re getting rid of blue links. Here we go again. The issues they we saw on AI Overviews. And it was a moment where you know, if Google has been trying to kind of boil the frog in terms of really slowly changing the experience to turn it into pretty much a full AI chat experience, this was the moment that the frog started to jump out a little bit. And that’s sort of what we saw on social, that people sort of saying. We have enough of this. This is making it worse. This is the last straw. And as people started doing that, you know, we saw people recommending DuckDuckGo in really high numbers. And also starting to download DuckDuckGo in much higher numbers than we were seeing before. Over the two weeks or th— really three weeks since the Google I/O conference, our installs are up thirty to forty percent above baseline. And so it was really exciting to see DuckDuckGo being a part of this conversation and people recognizing after you know talking about optionality for a long time, sort of people recognizing that that’s a really important part of our product and coming to us for that reason. Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we saw this amazing conversation a folding unfolding around us. Can you go a little deeper in terms of how we joined the conversations, worked to reach more people and some highlights of what they were saying? Kamyl: Absolutely. There were multiple Reddit threads about, you know, not only the the the news that Google was making these changes, but then about how much we had grown. At one point we had announced that search that that installs were up almost eighty percent, almost seventy-five percent from a pre-Google I/O baseline. And once this news got out and people were reacting to it, it it really just exploded. It was kind of an important social proof, I think, that people were interested in seeing that, you know, people aren’t just complaining about Google, but they’re actually trying out different things. We’ve even done some research about, you know, who are these new folks coming to DuckDuckGo and what are the reasons that they’re that they’re coming to us. And one of the top reasons is that they’re unsatisfied with Google’s search results. That the quality had gone down to to an extent that they had sort of finally had it. And, you know, of course many users feel trapped within the Google ecosystem, so it’s not exactly easy to leave. But I think installing us was sort of the easiest way to do that. And you know, seeing so many threads on Reddit, for example, with twenty K plus upvotes. I think we made the front page of Reddit. It was it was pretty amazing to watch. Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. Well— Kamyl: So as a part of that, you know, I want to now ask you a few questions. You know, that was sort of the tip of the spear when we saw this incredible engagement online. We thought, okay, how could we start to extend the conversation and maybe do some paid channels? What was our approach there? How did we start to pivot a little bit? Cristina: Yeah, well we we saw this amazing organic growth and wanted to help amplify it. Normally we spend months planning a campaign and making creative, but this was very much about time is of the essence and we had to mobilize quickly. In a way, we had planned for this kind of moment, seeing the big reaction in this yes/no AI campaign we did earlier this year, and so the foundation was in place. We launched so many channels in record time. A national billboard campaign, including over a dozen in Times Square, radio, TV, YouTube, many, many channels. And the messages included things like big tech forces AI on you. We make it optional. And AI surveillance should be banned. AI should be optional and private. We wanted to be very straightforward, point to the moment we were reacting to, and share a bit of a TLDR manifesto. Kamyl: Yeah, it was so fun to see the team work so quickly in getting all this new content up and then seeing seeing the response. So can you talk a little bit about what the response and the results have been like? Cristina: Yeah, I mean, on the qualitative side, like we saw in the organic response, it was just incredible. Folks echoing our rallying cry, engaging with the ads, talking about it in a way we haven’t seen before. Social ads were getting tons of upvotes and shares, right? An ad getting upvotes, it kind of hurts my brain a little bit. But as a marketer, it’s amazing. And lots of jokes from people about how they actually like seeing this ad. To build on what you said earlier, we saw tons of installs and visits with a combination of the organic and the paid work that we did and you know records for for us internally. Installs climbed to a peak of about 75% above pre-announcement levels. And you know, again, I’ve settled down, but a really healthy baseline, above baseline. And then visits to no AI also surged, peaking at something like 6x what we

    Duck Tales: AI optionality, and why DuckDuckGo installs are up ~40% since Google swapped search for AI mode (Ep.35)

  8. 17 Jun

    Duck Tales: Voice-mode in Duck.ai. The private, hands-free way to chat with popular AIs (Ep.34)

    In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Fran (Engineering) discuss voice-mode in Duck.ai, common use cases, and how it’s private. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com Beah: Hello, welcome to another episode of Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear about our vision, our product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. In this episode, you are going to hear about our voice AI chat feature. And I have with me today Fran, who played a very large role in building and shipping that feature. So Fran, do you want to just briefly introduce yourself? Fran: Yeah, so hi everyone. I’m Fran. I’m an engineer at DuckDuckGo and I’ve been working on Duck.ai for a long time now and yes, I was heavily involved in building voice chat and yeah, it’s a very exciting feature. Beah: Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us. And I’m Beah. For anyone who hasn’t already met me on one of these podcasts, I’m on our product team. Before, so I have a bunch of questions for Fran, but before I jump in, I want to make a ask of our listeners, actually. So we’ve been doing these podcasts for a little over six months, I think, now, and have a pretty good audience following on Substack. We would love to hear from you, our listeners, get some feedback about like things that you you like about how we’re approaching this, things maybe you don’t like, and also like what topics you would like us to talk more about so we can plan future episodes with your interests in mind. So if you have any feedback or want to talk to us, send us a note at podcast@duckduckgo.com. and we’ll also put that address in the show notes. So with that said, let’s talk more about voice chat. so Fran, can you just tell me like to get started, what is this feature? How does it work? Maybe you can give us a quick demo. Fran: Yes, definitely. so voice chat is a hands-free conversation mode inside Duck.ai. so yes, so far our users have been able to talk with any with many chat models via text. And we wanted to provide a privacy focused way for you to just have a conversation with your model. There’s some really cool real-time models out there right now, and we wanted to incorporate this feature on Duck.ai as well. so yeah. With voice mode, you can basically have a call with the model and talk directly to it. It will listen, it will reply out loud. you can also interrupt it mid conversation and like if you want to correct or actually add some extra information, the model will stop and listen to you and then reply back. It can pick up a little bit how are you expressing yourself to also help that play into the response that it will give back to you. Beah: They have people. Fran: And so I have here on my phone Duck.ai. And if you want to use it, like we have this very handy voice chat, you can go there and you can just start talking. So can you give me the weather for New York today? Beah: Yeah, yeah. Fran: Just new it’s city in New York City, the temperature is around twenty eight degrees Celsius with a heavy thunderstorm. Celsius and the low tonight could drop to twenty-four degrees. There’s a heat advisory in effect as well, so it might feel quite humid. Make sure to stay hydrated and be prepared for possible flooding. You can also check the extended forecast on sites like AccuWeather or the Weather Channel. Yeah, that’s very nice. So yeah, you can ask follow-up questions inside the same session. Right now I’ve muted myself, so you can also mute in case you want the model to not hear you at the moment. And and yeah, it has access to web search as well, so you can also get the news, get weather information or any up to date information. Beah: Nice. I am not too far from New York City and I can vouch for it being very humid today. cool. Yeah, so t tell me, I know that the demo, you know, I hopefully people can see it well enough f on the screen, but if you couldn’t, there’s like a little ghosty character with a bow tie. tell me a little bit. Who’s that? What’s his deal, his or her deal? Fran: yes. so that is our voice mascot. we wanted to provide like a visual aid and like represent that the AI is speaking to you so you can just see when the AI is listening and replying back to you. So we created this mascot to be there with you during the session. And we wanted this mascot to also have a little nod to Dax, our technical mascot. Beah: Yeah. Fran: so that’s why it has also the green bow tie and it’s white, so it it it’s it’s a nod to Dax. Yeah. Beah: Yeah, so if you’re not familiar with Dax, that’s the name of the DuckDuckGo duck that you see, the Debonair, yeah. duck with the bow tie. awesome. and by the way, like on the point about the dem demoing this is a little bit challenging because of the audio and the back and forth, but just go like after this podcast or in the middle of this podcast, go try it. it’s you know, if you don’t already have the DuckDuckGo app, you can download the DuckDuckGo app on your phone. You can also try it on desktop. Fran: Yeah. Beah: And actually, Fran, I should ask, is it free or do users have to pay to use voice chat? Fran: It is completely free. so our free tier users can access voice chat directly from either that button or the sidebar as as you could see. And yes, with with the pro and plus subscriptions you do get more time to speak with the model, but it’s available for everyone right now on your phone on or desktop. Beah: Awesome. cool. So maybe can you tell me a little bit about why we decided to build it at all? Like what instigated this whole project? Fran: yeah, so like I was saying before, like we there’s some cool voice models out there and we wanted to give like this hands-free way for people to talk with with our with their chat model. and we also wanted to have a private way for them to speak, so we did put in place some technical ways for us to improve like our privacy and anonymizing your voice when we when you’re connecting to the provider to speak with it. and yeah we want to give you this free hands-free way of talking with the model is also better for accessibility like we’ve gotten feedback like some people struggle using the text chat so with this you can just connect and start talking with the model uninterrupted. Beah: Even the. Yeah. Okay. Fran: So yeah, it’s been a very, a very cool feature. And we know voice is a very unique thing for the users, so we wanted to provide a way for our users to be able to use that in a private and secure environment. Beah: Everything. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Can you is there anything else that you wanna add about like how we handled priv like how we made it in fact meaningfully private? Fran: Yes, definitely. it was challenging because right now there is so many different ways to handle voice models that are out there. Like different providers have different ways that they provide. Like we did this connection directly with the model using real-time web technologies. So you’re actually like having a call with the model. but there are other ways where you could parse the conversation, maybe turn to text, but then a lot of the details and the nuances of your talk can be lost in between. So we found we looked into this balance of having a good user experience while also preserving your privacy. So the way also that we build, like there is this relay in between you and the provider, and we anonymize all the metadata and the information of your call. So the provider doesn’t really know who you are. Although your va your voice is still unique to you. You should be mindful of that. But apart from that, everything else we anonymize during the call. Yeah. Beah: Hmm. That’s cool. just to like kind of loop back to what you were saying about the why we build it in the first place. I’m personally like I’m not a huge voice input person. I know a lot of people are, but I don’t usually talk to my phone unless I’m actually calling a human. and I found it pretty cool ‘cause like, I don’t know, it is really convenient sometimes just to not I don’t know, they’re like when you’re on the go or something, right? And don’t have your typing fingers available. I’ve I’ve actually found that pretty handy and just been like impressed by how slick it is with the like hand it handling interruption. And I know we had to dial that in a little bit, like at least on my iPhone, it was way too sensitive at first and it thought like all the background noises were interruptions and yeah. But I I think now it’s pretty slick. Fran: Yeah. No, it’s super cool and we’ve gotten so many positive feedback like from I’ve got people who reach out to me and say like I was stuck in traffic so I wanted to check something real quick so they use voice mode so they could still pay attention around them and like while they were sitting there waiting for traffic to move, they could quickly use and make some lookups. I’ve heard from people that also use it to practice a different language since the model can understand so many different languages. And even me, I’ve tried like speaking in one language and then switching to my native, like speaking English and then switching to my native one, and it can pick up like flawlessly. it’s it’s very nice. Yeah, I I enjoy a lot the the hands-free and versatility of it, and I’ve yeah, I I’ve used for a few things where Beah: Nee. Yeah. Fran: Me speaking is easier than me typing down what I want to to ask the model about. Yeah. Beah: Yeah, I’ve been using it like I guess as like a thought par

    Duck Tales: Voice-mode in Duck.ai. The private, hands-free way to chat with popular AIs (Ep.34)
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About

Behind the scenes with the DuckDuckGo team — sharing insights on product, engineering, leadership, and AI. insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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  • Creator
    DuckDuckGo
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    41
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © DuckDuckGo
  • Show Website
    Inside DuckDuckGo

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