Episode Details

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Emanuele (Engineering) discuss Sync — which lets you have consistent bookmarks, passwords, and AI chats across devices — how it’s unique from a privacy perspective, and what’s coming next.

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: Hi, 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. In this episode, we’re going to talk about our Sync feature. So today, Emanuele has joined me. I’m Beah. You haven’t met me before. I’m on the product team here at DuckDuckGo and Emanuele is, well, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

Emanuele: Yeah, thanks. Hi, Beah. Welcome everyone. I am Emanuele. I have been at DuckDuckGo for about six plus years and I’ve been involved in Autofill and Sync almost from the start. Yeah.

Beah: Cool. All right, well let’s dig in. I have a few questions for you. So first of all, what are we even talking about? What is Sync?

Emanuele: Sync is a feature that lets you synchronize your data from one device to another. For example, you may have a collection of bookmarks on your desktop and you want to see the same bookmarks on your mobile device. You set up Sync and all your data is showing across both devices seamlessly.

Beah: It sounds very handy. So you can sync bookmarks. What else can you sync across devices?

Emanuele: Yeah, you can sync also autofill data, credentials, and credit cards. You can also sync, well, we said bookmarks. Recently, we added Chat Sync, so you can sync your Duck AI chats across devices. This is currently only available for our own first-party applications, but we are expanding to other browsers as well.

Beah: Nice. So like, just to kind of paint a picture here, I have a MacBook Pro, I have a Windows laptop, I have an iPhone, and have an Android phone as well. And I’m like, you know, trying to log in to Reddit in all these places. If I save my Reddit credentials, my login, my username and my password on any of those devices, then it can automatically sync to all of those. So then the next day when I’m like out and about on my phone, if I logged in on my laptop, like the password just autofills and I can log right in. Is that right? And then now with that...

Emanuele: Exactly. Yeah.

Beah: Duck AI chats, as you’ve mentioned as well, if I wanted to like, so what’s the yeah, tell me about chats. What’s the use case there? Why do I care that it’s across my devices?

Emanuele: Well, the use case, I use it a lot personally when I chats on the desktop and then I want to continue in the evening on the couch, I can resume the same chat and continue the conversation with Duck AI from there. I also use it for looking at older chats and basically maybe I chatted with Duck AI for something a while ago, and all of a sudden I remember, oh, well, there was this information that I already discussed with Duck AI, and I can go when I’m on the go outside with a f