Duck Tales: Improving AI chat organization, and feature decisions at DuckDuckGo (Episode 8)

12 Nov 2025 · 12 min

Episode Duck Tales: Improving AI chat organization, and feature decisions at DuckDuckGo (Episode 8)

0:00 11:52

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Esteban (Design) discuss AI chat organization, from automatic chat naming to ‘pinning’ your most used chats.

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Gabriel: Hello, welcome to DuckTales. Inside DuckDuckGo features people, et cetera. You got me as the host again, this time I’m the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo. And I got Esteban with me today. Esteban, wanna introduce yourself?

Esteban: Sure. Hi everyone. I’m Esteban. Hi Gabriel. Esteban, I’m a designer in the team.

Gabriel: Sweet. And that’s what we’re talking about today, Duck AI, and in particular, kind of new features we’ve been introducing around conversation organization that Estevan has been designing and working on. And we’ve been releasing kind of a few of these over the last couple of months. You want to just jump in, you want to share your screen and walk us through it. I realize we have some of this on audio now only.

Esteban: Sure.

Gabriel: Let’s also try to describe what we’re seeing while we do it. I’ll do the same thing.

Esteban: Yes, for sure. Let me just share my screen and I’ll walk you through a few of the things that we recently dumped. Yes, so if you’re like me, you have tons of like conversations going on at the same time. What we have seen from users is that people who are very engaged with our platform, they end up having tons of conversations and then sometimes it’s harder to get back to them and to find the one that you needed. So we launched three things. The first one, I’ll show you an example. I was trying to see if I should ask you for a promotion during this podcast. Clearly no. ⁓ But the cool thing was that we, yeah, I will wait for a better time. ⁓ The first thing that we shipped was that we had ⁓ a title, the title of our,

Gabriel: Good answer.

Esteban: Chats were basically the same first prompt. It was just duplicated. That would make it harder to read. So the first thing that we launched was this automatic titling. We’re using the LLM to come up with a better title at the top. So it’s easier to find. ⁓

Gabriel: So this is similar to how ChatGPT and some other competitors are doing it, right? So like we used to do just to repeat, so I understand fully, I think I do, ⁓ having reviewed this when it launched, but just to make sure. ⁓ Yeah, we used to just literally repeat the prompt as your title, like the beginning of the prompt. And so that it was kind of weird sometimes and duplicated sometimes, but now we run in the background something that... ⁓

Esteban: Definitely Right.Yeah.

Gabriel: Summarizes it for you and then automatically does this. You don’t have to do anything, right?

Esteban: Yes. Exactly. And for example, I’m trying a new one. What day is today? That’s my prompt. And then immediately what I get as a title is day to day. The one thing is that sometimes the title is not exactly what you will call it. Like maybe day to day is not super descriptive. So we added this minor option, no? So we can say, I don’t know, day to day, it’s Thursday. Simple but useful.

Gabriel: So if you want to do whatever you want, yeah, like if you don’t like our casing or something, you can put everything in lowercase or whatever, you can just rename it at will, yeah.

Esteban: Yeah. Exactly. Yes, so after you have you want to name stuff, it’s very helpful when you have like several chats about something similar, but you want to have it personalized so it’s easier to find. So super simple, nothing that I don’t know, it’s blowing innovation in a way, but very useful. The second one is we noticed how ⁓ lots of our users were asking us for ways to save conversations and finding the conversations faster. We also have a limit of how many conversations you can have right now. There’s just 30 chats after the 30th chat. The next one gets…

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