The AI race is officially on, and now DuckDuckGo has tossed its hat in the ring. The popular privacy-based search engine just launched a beta version of its own AI search tool, powered by ChatGPT, which they're calling DuckAssist.

Unlike Microsoft's botched (and frankly disturbing) AI integration with Bing, DuckAssist isn't a chatbot and is limited to Wikipedia for data sources. The tool will suggest an automatic solution when it recognizes a search term it can answer and is designed to be fully integrated into DuckDuckGo Private Search.

The company explained in a blog post:

If you enter a question that can be answered by Wikipedia into our search box, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to anonymously generate a brief, sourced summary of what it finds in Wikipedia — right above our regular private search results. It's completely free and private itself, with no sign-up required, and it's available right now.

The tool is free and only available for now on DuckDuckGo's mobile and computer apps (iOS, Android, Mac), as well as the company's browser extensions (Firefox, Chrome, Safari).

DuckDuckGo says DuckAssist won't collect personal information and will keep users' search and browsing history anonymous in all data shared with OpenAI and Anthropic – which is important to many of us.

The company says this is just one of several AI-powered tools it has in the works, and as for DuckAssist, "If the trial goes well, we plan to roll it out to all DuckDuckGo search users soon."