DuckDuckGo enables real-time AI voice chats with privacy protection: Here’s how it works

DuckDuckGo

• DuckDuckGo's Duck.ai now offers optional real-time voice chat for hands-free use
• Voice chats are private, unrecorded, and not used for AI training
• Works in most browsers except Firefox; higher usage limits for subscribers.

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Privacy-focused browser DuckDuckGo has unveiled an optional voice mode for its AI assistant Duck.ai, providing the ability to speak to the assistant in real time rather than rely on text conversations. This provides Duck.ai users with a hands-free way to talk to the AI assistant while ensuring that the audio conversations remain private, unrecorded, and excluded from AI training.

DuckDuckGo’s voice chat feature: Key details

This new feature lets users have real-time voice conversations with the Duck.ai chatbot, allowing them to talk to the assistant instead of typing, with the system responding aloud to answer a user’s queries. It is a major additional feature to the Duck.ai chatbot, which was unveiled last March, expanding beyond text chat. The feature works in most browsers except for Firefox, for which support is still in development.

According to DuckDuckGo, users can enable the voice function as per their requirement, even access it without signing up, and unlock its daily usage caps through a subscription, with subscribers getting higher limits than free users. “Like all of our AI features, voice chat is totally optional. Even after you opt in, you can change your mind any time. Head to your http://Duck.ai settings to toggle the feature on and off,” the company added in a post.

DuckDuckGo has added that these voice chats are routed to an OpenAI system via an encrypted relay. Audio captured from the user's microphone is transmitted in real time for transcription, with the company assuring that it cannot decrypt or inspect the secured link.

Moreover, these voice inputs are not retained once a conversation concludes, as the audio recordings or clips aren’t used to train artificial intelligence models. Users can start a voice session by enabling the voice mode in Duck.ai and allowing microphone access through the browser’s settings.