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Try DuckDuckGo’s New AI Feature, DuckAssist, Now for Free

DuckAssist isn’t a chatbot, so you shouldn’t get weird responses like you can with some other AI tools.

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has a new optional artificial intelligence feature called DuckAssist. Users of DuckDuckGo’s browser apps or extensions can access a beta version of the feature now, for free.

Unlike ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing AI, DuckAssist isn’t a chatbot, DuckDuckGo says. Instead, it’s an addition to the search engine’s existing Instant Answers feature. Instant Answers taps various online sources to give you a quick answer to your query without you having to click one of the links in the search results. Now DuckAssist can lend a hand, but it pulls from a smaller set of sources.

Enter a question into the DuckDuckGo search bar and DuckAssist scans Wikipedia, and occasionally Britannica, to generate an answer. DuckAssist uses technology from ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Anthropic to summarize the answer and make the response more conversational. When DuckAssist answers, it also links to the Wikipedia or Britannica article it pulled its answer from. 

For now, the best way to use DuckAssist is to ask questions with straightforward answers, Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO, wrote in a blog post. That means DuckAssist can answer questions like, «What is the capital of Nigeria?» better than questions with qualitative elements like, «What is the best Legend of Zelda game?» (But this writer says Majora’s Mask.)

Weinberg wrote that wording a query in the form of a question will make it more likely that DuckAssist will generate a response. He also wrote that if you’re pretty sure Wikipedia has the answer to your question, adding «wiki» to any question also makes it more likely that DuckAssist will appear. 

DuckAssist answering the question "What color is 'the dress?'"DuckAssist answering the question "What color is 'the dress?'"

DuckAssist can settle the age old question, «What color is ‘the dress’?»

DuckDuckGo

DuckAssist won’t always generate the correct answer, according to Weinberg. The tool might struggle to correctly answer complex questions, too.

«There’s a limit to the amount of information the feature can summarize,» Weinberg wrote. «Inaccuracies can happen if our relevancy function is off, unintentionally omitting key sentences, or if there’s an underlying error in the source material given.»

DuckDuckGo said DuckAssist is anonymous, doesn’t use queries to train its AI model and doesn’t share personally identifiable information with third parties.

Though DuckAssist is being released in beta, DuckDuckGo said that if the beta goes well, it plans to release DuckAssist to all search users in the weeks ahead. DuckDuckGo also plans to release other AI-enhanced search and browsing features in the near future.

You can also disable DuckAssist in search settings if you don’t want to use the tool. Disabling DuckAssist will also disable all Instant Answers outside of DuckAssist, too. 

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Microsoft’s and Google’s AI tools were introduced in February.

CNET

DuckDuckGo joins other tech companies, like Microsoft and Google, that have introduced their own AI tools to the public in the last few months. 

Many of these other tools are chatbots based on, or developed in opposition to, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and they let you carry on a conversation with an AI, to a limited degree. 

Despite the buzz around such tools, AI is still a work in progress. In December, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, said users of ChatGPT should be careful.

«ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness,» Altman tweeted. «It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.»

In February, Microsoft began limiting the number of responses that its Bing AI can send, to stop conversations from getting weird and confusing the chatbot. It later relaxed the restriction, but only slightly.

Some AI tools, like Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI, have also included inaccurate information in their responses. DuckDuckGo said that because DuckAssist draws from a limited number of sources, the chance of the tool generating incorrect information is reduced.

For more, check out how Microsoft has limited Bing’s AI chatbot, what to know about Google’s chatbot Bard and what to know about Snapchat’s AI chatbot.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see this post.

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WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September

Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog. 

Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.


Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.


WWE 2K25

Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.

Persona 5 Tactica

Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.

Other games on PS Plus

Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.

*Premium subscribers only.

For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.

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Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween

The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.

This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving. 

In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths. 

It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress. 

Surviving your little nightmares

While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.

The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.

While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench. 

But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.

And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate. 

This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.

In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.) 

But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

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