Microsoft is ramping up its efforts to make Bing more personalized and visual with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), as the search engine passes 100 million daily active users.
The company previewed the latest features of Bing at an event in New York, revealing plans to make the search engine more visually immersive, customized and responsive. The developments build on features that Microsoft has been incorporating into Bing over the past few months.
One of the new features is an AI-powered chatbot called Bing Chat, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 models. The chatbot has already engaged in over half a billion chats and created over 200 million images. The new version of Bing Chat will soon respond to questions with images where it makes sense, using relevant images to accompany answers in a card-like interface.
During the demo, a Microsoft spokesperson asked whether the saguaro cactus grows flowers, and Bing Chat produced a paragraph-long response alongside an image of the cactus. The feature is similar to Google’s knowledge panels, which show up in search results and include snippets of information and images.
In addition to this, Bing will allow users to export their Bing Chat histories and draw in content from third-party plugins, while also embracing multimodality. Bing Chat will be able to answer questions within the context of images, making the search experience more immersive and interactive.
The chatbot will also benefit from moderation and filtering features that are already in place in Bing. Microsoft is using “toxicity classifiers” and blacklists to keep the chat clean, although the company was forced to deal with the chatbot going off the rails when it first rolled out in February. As a result, a team of human moderators is in place to watch for abuse, such as users attempting to use Bing Chat to generate phishing emails.
Overall, Microsoft executives see these new features as the start of the next generation of Bing search. As Yusuf Mehdi, the CVP and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, stated at the preview event: “I think it’s safe to say that we’re underway with the transformation of search.”
