Microsoft’s Bing Chat service has not released much new news in the past few weeks, today the company revealed many new features of the service and announced that Bing Chat has now officially entered Open Preview mode, which anyone can use.
While Microsoft seemed to remove the Bing Chat waitlist months ago, the company has now officially announced that Bing Chat has entered Open Preview. All you need is a Microsoft account to use Bing Chat on your mobile device or in the Edge browser on your desktop. Microsoft claims that Bing Chat currently has more than 100 million daily active users and has had a total of more than 500 million chats since launch. The company also said daily installs of the Bing mobile app have quadrupled compared to usual since Bing Chat was first launched.
One of the most requested features by Bing chat users is saving previous chats. Microsoft said today that the feature, which will allow users to pause a chat and resume a previously paused chat later, will be rolling out “shortly.” “When you want to drill down on something and open a Bing chat result, your chat moves to your Edge sidebar so you can use your chat anytime you browse the web,” Microsoft says. Over time Over time, we’re exploring making your chats more personal by bringing the context of previous chats into new conversations.”
Microsoft will also add ways to quickly export and share chat transcripts, saying: “For those who want to easily share your conversations with others or continue exploring a newly discovered idea, you can export it directly — the format remains unchanged so that it can continue in collaboration tools such as Microsoft Word.”
In March of this year, Microsoft launched Bing Image Generator, a tool that uses text prompts to generate images with generative AI. The company claims that users have generated more than 200 million images with this AI program. Bing Image Generator is expanding Its coverage, which previously only supported English, now supports text prompts in more than 100 languages supported by Bing. Microsoft also says it’s adding visual search to Bing chat, so you can upload pictures in chat and search Bing for things related to them. It will also add visual elements to searches in chat, including things like charts and graphs.
Microsoft also revealed some changes related to its Edge browser. Edge mobile will also soon support page context, so users can ask questions in Bing chat related to the mobile page they’re viewing. The compose feature in the sidebar can now also customize drafts based on feedback users give, such as tone, length, wording, and more. Bing chat will also offer improvements to the summarization of large articles and documents in Edge, and will introduce what Microsoft calls “Edge Actions”: “In the next few weeks, people will soon be able to use AI to complete more tasks, and step by step. Fewer. For example, if you want to watch a specific movie, the action in Edge will find and display the option in chat in the sidebar, and then play the movie you want to watch from where it’s available.”
Microsoft added that it will continue to monitor the use of Bing chat to ensure the fair use of its AI tools: “Together with our partners at OpenAI, we continue to implement safeguards against harmful content based on what we learn and see in the preview. In line with our AI principles, our teams continue to work hard to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data security, and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content.”
Today Microsoft also confirmed a previous rumor that it will soon allow developers to create plugins for Bing Chat, saying: “If you research the latest dinner restaurant in Bing Chat, it will use OpenTable to help you find and book. Or, with Wolfram Alpha, you can create powerful visualizations and get answers to complex scientific, mathematical, and data-based human questions directly from Bing Chat.”
Microsoft said it will work with OpenAI, the team that developed GPT-4, to help add plugin functionality, and OpenAI has added plugin support to ChatGPT. Although there is not much information on this, Microsoft said that more information will be revealed soon at the Build 2023 developer conference, which will be held in Seattle on May 23-24, and most of the meetings will be broadcast live. Home will bring more news.
