Microsoft announced an impressive package with five new features that promise to make Bing Chat even more complete, which includes the possibility of scheduling a restaurant appointment for you. The promise is to take artificial intelligence to unprecedented levels with resources that no rival has been able to offer so far – and, best of all, for free.
Check out the five new AI features from Bing introduced this Thursday (4):
5. Answers with images and videos
Another big news is the ability to produce responses with images and videos. Microsoft’s chatbot currently only supports text inputs and outputs, but will create more complete content on top of other media formats.
The so-called Multimodal Support should offer more contextualized and optimized results with the aid of audiovisual materials. Instead of having to describe a video, the AI can just find interesting YouTube content and attach it to the response to reinforce its explanation.
The tool will also allow the creation of formatted tables and graphs. This means that the search engine will be able to organize data to generate a visual representation of your company’s revenue or create Excel files with the results of an opinion survey.
Soon, the promise is that the chatbot will also be able to analyze images to create content from photographs. Instead of describing a scenario in words, for example, you can just upload the image and let the AI do the work automatically.
4. Bing Chat History
You will be able to access conversations from a history associated with your account when using any device. History is a feature that has existed in ChatGPT since launch, but was not present in Bing Chat.
By the way, for those using Edge, it will be possible to click on the Bing Chat links to be directed to the source of the information without giving up the conversations. Edge Sidebar will keep Bing open on the recent conversation, so the person doesn’t have to leave the current site to interact with the AI.
The advantage of this is that no one will ever lose answers given by the chatbot, as everything is registered. You can open an old conversation and resume interactions where you left off, without having to build a new interaction from scratch.
In addition, the conversation system gained a download button to facilitate the extraction of information. Instead of selecting everything, you can just click on the arrow icon to transfer the texts, tables and graphics created by Bing — which can be exported directly to Microsoft software, such as Word or Excel.
3. Schedule appointments at restaurants
Perhaps the funniest news of the time is the so-called Edge Actions, a feature that should unify search and chat sessions into an integrated experience. This will allow you to ask Bing to make a reservation for you at your favorite restaurant without having to leave the conversation.
In the demo, the chatbot connected to the Open Table service to display dates and times with restaurant openings in New York. The user chooses his favorite and the service takes care of making the reservation.
In the future, this service is likely to be expanded to more activities, such as buying a movie or concert ticket. That’s a promise that Google made in the past with Duplex technology, but it never quite panned out to the end user like Bing does now.
Unfortunately it should take some time for this function to be functional in Brazil.
2. Even more refined responses
The content can be created from refinements in Bing’s response tone, as Microsoft has previously tested. It will be possible to define whether the generated content will have a professional, enthusiastic or relaxed style.
New includes the ability to choose the response size and format. You can get just the content in paragraphs, like Bing did before, or ask it to compose it like an email. You can turn the material into topical ideas or even create a full blog post.
Before completing, the AI will display a preview of the text that can be further adjusted, either to add details or to mention a specific platform. In the video shown by Microsoft, you could see the ability to ask Bing to use more action verbs, remove redundant words or quantify presented data.
This set of refinements is unheard of in chatbots released to date. Microsoft seems committed to making its product more and more geared towards the user’s intended purpose, whether the user wants a direct answer or a great scholarly article for their personal website.
1. Open to third parties
Finally, Microsoft promised to open up the platform’s capabilities so that developers and other companies can integrate Bing’s technology into products or services. It will be possible to provide a conversation box for people to ask queries or perform tasks without being on the Bing website or the Edge browser.
“New Bing” with free access
According to corporate vice president and director of consumer marketing at Microsoft Yusuf Mehdi, Bing will no longer use the famous waiting list for product testing. Therefore, anyone who opens the search will be able to use both Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator if they have a Microsoft account.
“In just 90 days, our users engaged in over half a billion chats. In addition, more than 200 million images were produced with Bing Image Creator”, emphasizes the executive.
Mehdi recalls that the search engine surpassed the mark of 100 million daily active users. The mobile app alone saw the number of installs increase fourfold since the arrival of Bing with integrated ChatGPT.
The “new Bing” combines OpenAI’s powerful GPT-4 language model with Microsoft’s search results. The purpose is to offer up-to-date answers to questions, help create content and deliver humanized conversations with the machine.
The news is already available from this Thursday (4th) for Bing users who use the service logged into their Microsoft account. The tip is to download Edge to get the most out of the announcements made today, as several inclusions require the browser to work. Last month, Bing added support for stories and increased the daily limit of interactions from 15 to 20 shifts.
