Microsoft advances its AI plans and makes the Bing Talk preview available to everyone

Microsoft announced a number of minor upgrades to its ChatGPT-powered Bing chatbot today and changed the product from a closed, invite-only preview to an open preview that anyone can join as part of its ongoing effort to incorporate generative AI elements into all of its products. Three months after Microsoft first unveiled the “new Bing,” this phase of the project shows Microsoft’s dedication to incorporating AI elements into all of its products as soon as feasible.

Anyone with a Microsoft Account can access the chatbot and other features of the New Bing during its “Open Preview” phase, which also sees an effort to make the chatbot “more visual.” Soon, Bing Chat will be able to produce graphs and charts as part of its responses, and the Bing Image Creator will be accessible in all of the more than 100 languages that Bing supports. You can search for photographs using a new visual search function by first uploading a related image to Bing Talk.

According to Microsoft VP Yusuf Medhi, the company also intends to increase the amount of context and history that Bing Chat can retain, “moving beyond single-use chat/search sessions to multi-session productivity experiences with chat history and persistent chats within Edge.” As a result, prior chat sessions will be accessible again, chats can be kept open while using Edge to explore the web, and chats will also “Bing Chat makes new talks more customized by bringing context from an earlier chat into them. ” The latter function will be implemented “over time” because Microsoft is still “exploring” it.

The extra time spent on exploration might be necessary. To prevent the Bing chatbot’s responses from becoming too strange, threatening, illogical, or simply buggy in the past, Microsoft had set a time restriction on each chat session and included different “personalities” (Microsoft’s term for this behavior is “conversational drift”). It’s unclear whether lengthening chat sessions and enabling Bing Chat to remember context from prior discussions would bring some of those issues back or make them worse.

In order to transform the Bing chatbot into a “platform,” Microsoft plans to offer support for third-party plugins in the near future. OpenTable and Wolfram|Alpha are mentioned by Microsoft as the chatbot’s initial partners for making reservations and enhancing its math and scientific capabilities, respectively. At Microsoft’s Build developer conference in late May, more details on how to build Bing Chat plugins will be disclosed.

According to Microsoft, every percentage point of the search market that Bing can capture from Google would generate almost $2 billion in advertising income each year. It’s easy to understand why Microsoft is promoting Bing Chat and generative AI features aggressively despite criticism and skepticism given that Google’s Bing Chat competitor, Bard, is off to a rocky start and there’s a general perception that Google search isn’t as good at surfacing good results as it once was.

Microsoft has added generative AI tools to Bing, Edge, Skype, GitHub, and other products in addition to Windows 11. Additionally, the business showed off a Copilot feature that will aid in automating the creation of documents and emails in Microsoft 365 programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

Listing image by Microsoft