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.