Brave Unveils 'Ask Brave': A New AI-Powered Search Feature Blending Traditional Search with AI Chat

Brave updates its AI-powered search with a detailed answers feature | TechCrunch

Browser maker and Google Search alternative Brave announced on Monday that it's adding a new feature to its AI-powered search suite, Ask Brave, to provide detailed answers on a topic based on the query. The search company said that this new feature will co-exist next to its AI Answers feature, which was introduced last year to give summarized responses to search queries. The company said that people are getting more than 15 million answers every day. You don't need to switch to a special mode to use Ask Brave. The search engine will automatically recognize what kind of query you are asking and give a response accordingly. You can use the ask button next to the Brave search box to begin a search. You can also turn your normal search query into an AI search query by tapping into the ask tab on the search page result. If you have the Brave search as your default search engine, you can append a double question mark "??" to a query to begin an ask Brave search query. "While AI Answers give our users quick summaries, Ask Brave provides longer answers, follow-ups, and a chat mode enhanced with Deep Research, and most importantly, contextually relevant enrichments such as videos, news articles, products, businesses, shopping, and more - in the right place, at the right time," said Chief of Search at Brave, Josep M. Pujol, in a statement. "Search makes it possible, LLMs glue it together. We anticipate that Ask Brave will generate millions more daily AI-powered answers with this powerful combination of search and chat, and look forward to deploying more useful AI-powered search tools for our users." The format of the answer you get out of Ask Brave is more akin to a report format that you get out of ChatGPT or Perplexity, which includes links, videos, and image carousels. Once you get the answer, you can ask the AI chatbot to convert the answer into a different format or ask follow-up questions. Brave said that it is using the company's own API to ground search results for accuracy, along with deep research for certain queries. AI-powered Q&A is now creeping into various search experiences. Google has expanded its AI mode to multiple languages, including a global rollout for Spanish last week. Brave's feature is similar but comes with a privacy claim that the company encrypts users' chats and deletes them after 24 hours of inactivity.

Brave launches 'Ask Brave' feature to fuse AI with traditional search

Brave Software, the creator of the privacy-focused web browser and search engine, has introduced a new subsystem called Ask Brave that unifies search and AI chat into a single interface. Ask Brave is free to use, accessible from any browser at search.brave.com/ask, and designed with privacy at its core. In essence, this new system combines traditional search results with AI-generated responses, enabling users to interact with the system and follow up on search queries in a chat-style format. Ask Brave is not a replacement for "AI Answers," Brave Search's AI-powered summarizer launched in 2023, which will continue to be available in the same form. Brave claims that the feature generates over 15 million answers daily, but it's not enough to bridge the gap between traditional search results and LLM-generated responses. This is precisely where Ask Brave fits into the picture. "With Ask Brave, users no longer have to choose between different tools depending on the action they want to perform, juggling between traditional search engines with their ten blue links, and chat-like interfaces with their walls of text," reads Brave's announcement. "Brave solves this problem by offering a system that combines the best of both approaches, eliminating the unnecessary back-and-forth between different platforms and cumbersome copy-pasting." Users can invoke Ask Brave by ending their search query with a double question mark "??" on Brave Search, clicking the "Ask" button on Brave Search (search.brave.com), or clicking the "Ask" tab on the search results page. The system operates in two modes, namely standard and deep research. The latter runs multiple search rounds across Brave's index to cover any blind spots around the topic, providing more exhaustive and detailed answers. Ask Brave draws information from the web and is less likely to hallucinate or include irrelevant information in its answers, according to the Brave team. Being part of Brave's ecosystem, privacy is uncompromising on Ask Brave. The team assures that all chats are encrypted, conversations aren't used for AI training, and they are deleted after 24 hours of inactivity. Also, Brave Search does not log IP addresses, so conversations linked to search queries aren't traceable to specific users. This contrasts with how most AI search and chat tools typically handle user data, logging everything for model training, fine-tuning, and personalization, unless users opt out.