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DuckDuckGo has made major changes to the way users can customize its its private and free Duck.ai AI chat service. This looks quite compelling.
“You can control the tone of responses, the length of responses, how you want Duck.ai to act, what you want to be called, and more right from the Duck.ai prompt box,” DuckDuckGo tweeted. “Any customizations get applied to all future conversations until reset or modified. You can see all additional instructions applied with the toggle on the bottom for transparency.”
As you may know, DuckDuckGo launched Duck.ai a little over a year ago–it was originally called DuckDuckGo AI Chat–as a way to use generative AI with third–party AI models for free without compromising your privacy. It exited preview this past March, and has been updated steadily with new features, including AI model switching, support for new models, and more. Duck.ai is available from the DuckDuckGo Search service, or directly at duck.ai.
According to DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg, the new changes the company made to Duck.ai are the result of feedback: Some like a chatbot to be exuberant and verbose, while others prefer for it to be less excited and more terse. And so now you can customize how it works: Just click the new “Customize Responses” button next to the prompt box to customize the following options, all of which are optional:
When you customize Duck.ai, the instructions that this customization creates are appended to the default system prompt and then communicated in the background to whatever models you’re interacting with. The customizations will apply to every chat you make until you change them.
“I’m sure what we’ll do here will continue to evolve as we get feedback,” Weinberg says. “But … it make the responses feel better, and it can make the actual content significantly better as well.”
As with everything DuckDuckGo, Duck.ai remains private. The system prompt customizations are stored locally on your device only, as are recent chats if you choose to save them. DuckDuckGo plans to add a Duck.ai settings and chat sync feature, but when that happens, it will be part of the company’s end-to-end encrypted sync service, which DuckDuckGo cannot decrypt.
“Our approach to AI is to make features that are useful, private, and optional,” Weinberg adds. “We believe these new Duck.ai customization options tick all three boxes.”
Paul Thurrott is an award-winning technology journalist and blogger with 30 years of industry experience and the author of 30 books. He is the owner of Thurrott.com and the host of three tech podcasts: Windows Weekly with Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell, Hands-On Windows, and First Ring Daily with Brad Sams. He was formerly the senior technology analyst at Windows IT Pro and the creator of the SuperSite for Windows from 1999 to 2014 and the Major Domo of Thurrott.com while at BWW Media Group from 2015 to 2023. You can reach Paul via email, Twitter or Mastodon.
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