Episode Details

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Fran (Engineering) discuss voice-mode in Duck.ai, common use cases, and how it’s private.

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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 i