Tag Archive for: Bing AI

Microsoft is overhauling its Bing search engine’s mobile experience with new features, better formatting, and integration with mobile apps for Skype and Edge.

The news came from Microsoft’s Global Head of Marketing, Divya Kumar, who showcased the new mobile experience and upcoming features in a blog post. 

Previewed Features Are Arriving This Week

First, Kumar announced that several features previewed in May will be launched over the next week. These features include:

  • Richer video experience on mobile and desktop
  • Knowledge Cards
  • Including graphs in search results
  • Improved Formatting
  • Better social sharing abilities

Along with these updates, Kumar says that chat history will be coming to desktop over the next week after already arriving on mobile. To access your chat history, hit the clock icon in the top right of an existing chat.

New Updates To Bing

The bulk of the announcement is dedicated to highlighting upcoming features for users on mobile devices.

For starters, Microsoft is premiering a Bing Chat widget that can be directly added to iOS or Android home screens – launching the new Bing Chat tools will always be possible with just a tap.

Additionally, Divya Kumar says that Bing is implementing the ability to continue a conversation across different platforms if you are signed in. For example, a user might start a conversation on desktop, but they will be able to pick up where they left off if they decide to move to a mobile device. 

Microsoft is also working to improve language support for non-English users with better voice input.

Third-Party App Integration

Microsoft has integrated its AI tools into its mobile keyboard app, SwiftKey to make drafting new messages efficient and intuitive.

Additionally, the company is bringing  Bing’s AI abilities to Skype by making the new Bing experience available from within any group chat. Just tag Bing in the chat to access the tools. 

Why It Matters

Bing has been pushing to change its status as a search engine through its diverse AI tools and major updates to all of its services. According to the announcement, it seems to be working.

The company says it is seeing 8x the number of daily downloads since it launched the new AI-assisted Bing and they expect to see further growth as they develop these tools and products further.

After an… interesting rollout, Bing is making some changes to its much-talked-about AI chatbot. As the company announced yesterday afternoon, Bing will limit users to 50 questions per day and 5 questions per session to rein in the new system. 

Since its rollout, users have been sharing examples of the chatbot, created in a partnership with OpenAI, getting up to all sorts of bad behavior. Some of the most notable include gaslighting users about the year, committing accidental racism, and even trying to blackmail a user by threatening to release personal information.

Early AI Chatbots “Somewhat Broken”

Addressing the situation in a tweet thread, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that the current AI tools are “somewhat broken” but stressed the importance of letting the world see and influence these early stages to help “get it right” down the line. 

“We think showing these tools to the world early, while still somewhat broken, is critical if we are going to have sufficient input and repeated efforts to get it right. the level of individual empowerment coming is wonderful, but not without serious challenges.”

At the same time, Altman says it is important to regulate these tools while they are more bark than bite, saying “we are potentially not that far away from potentially scary ones.”

What Bing Is Changing

Bing is limiting chat sessions to 50 chat “turns” or questions a day, with each session being limited to 5 “turns”. Specifically, Microsoft defined a turn as a complete exchange including a question from a user and a reply. 

“Our data has shown that the vast majority of you find the answers you’re looking for within 5 turns and that only ~1% of chat conversations have 50+ messages. After a chat session hits 5 turns, you will be prompted to start a new topic. At the end of each chat session, context needs to be cleared so the model won’t get confused. Just click on the broom icon to the left of the search box for a fresh start.”

For more, read the announcement from Bing here

In a closed-door presentation at the Microsoft offices, the company revealed it would be integrating ChatGPT’s AI capabilities into Bing and Microsoft web browsers. 

Introducing the new feature, Microsoft CEO reportedly told event attendees that “this technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category.”

Billed as “your AI-powered copilot for the web”, the new feature unites information from Bing with capabilities from Edge web browser and artificial intelligence. Together, users can turn to AI features to get direct answers to questions, find information in more effective ways, and recontextualize the content they find.

According to Nadella, search engines currently fail to deliver the most efficient experience up to 40% of the time, causing users to click on search results and immediately click back to search results. 

With these new capabilities, Microsoft hopes to change that radically.

How It Works

The new AI-powered Bing uses a next-generation language model from OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT) which is reportedly even more powerful than ChatGPT.

Additionally, Microsoft is using a new model to improve the relevance of answers and keep them up to date. 

Nadella says this AI model has already been applied to Bing’s core search algorithm, causing the biggest jump in search relevance ever. 

The centerpiece of the new experience is an expanded search box that allows users to input up to 1,000 characters and a chatbot that allows users to interact with Bing in conversational language. 

Notably, this means the search engine will be able to easily follow up on previous searches and provide greater context or translate information into more understandable formats.

For example, the company demonstrated the AI’s capabilities by quickly summarizing a 15-page PDF with a single click or translating a piece of code into another programming language.

Try It Yourself

The new search experience is seeing a limited preview release on desktop devices. Starting today, anyone can try out the new experience by visiting Bing.com and conducting a series of sample searches. 

However, the feature is expected to see a complete release and mobile version soon.