It’s been three months since Microsoft unveiled the “New Bing,” an AI-powered chatbot that incorporated the power of GPT-4 into its search engine. This week, the company announced the next step in its journey through the AI revolution.
In a blog post, corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi explained four new developments in Microsoft’s generative AI offerings: ending the waitlist for Bing AI, enhancing its visual element, adding multimodal support and persistent chats, and opening up the platform to third-party developers.
The most significant announcement comes first; Bing is now in Open Preview. Before today, the product was in Limited Preview, and potential users needed to join a waitlist to use Bing’s AI chatbot. Now the waiting list is gone, and all you need to use the new Bing is a Microsoft account and the Edge web browser.
Enhancing support to Bing AI chat means you won’t just get text answers to your queries anymore. The company is incorporating charts and graphs into AI answers. It is also updating how it formats chat answers to help you find the information you’re looking for more quickly.
Until now, Bing’s AI chat could only have a single conversation session with a user. When they came in for a new discussion, the AI would forget what came before. Now, with persistent chat, users can pick up where they left off talking to Bing with the chat history intact.
Another nice touch of the new update is that Microsoft is adding export and share functions into the AI chat. This allows users to easily download and post AI conversations on social media.
The last big development is that AI-powered Bing is becoming a platform. Soon, developers will be able to download plugins they can integrate into their products. The company pointed out use cases, including leveraging OpenTable to help you find a dinner reservation and using Wolfram|Alpha to create powerful visualizations. Microsoft expects to roll out this feature this month.
To use the newly opened Bing AI preview, simply download the Edge browser and log into your Microsoft account.
Source: Microsoft Blog
