Restaurant bookings, movie searches, and other tasks that Microsoft's Bing will be able to do, following an upgrade
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- Microsoft said it's scrapping the waitlist for its AI-powered Bing and introducing new features.
- After the update, people will be able to use the chatbot to book restaurants and play movies.
- The company is also introducing longer chat histories and visual searches.
Microsoft's AI-boosted Bing is getting a new update.
Three months after it first launched the new search engine, Microsoft has said it's scrapping Bing's waitlist and introducing several features.
In a Thursday blogpost, the company announced the introduction of "Edge actions," which incorporate Microsoft Edge with Bing's Chat feature. The update will allow users to do tasks like search for movies in the Bing Chat sidebar, and launch and play the film in Edge.
Microsoft said it's allowing third-party developers to build on top of Bing Chat, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, to help people complete tasks. For example, the company plans to leverage the reservation site OpenTable to help users find and book restaurants.
The company also plans to beef up Bing Chat's "memory," something that caused issues for Microsoft after the search engine launched. The chat feature is moving from single-use sessions where the chatbot refreshes during each session to a model that lets users return to previous chat histories. The chats, which were previously text-only, will also incorporate visual answers.
After Bing's chat feature launched, some users found they could provoke the chatbot into engaging in inappropriate and creepy conversations during long sessions. Microsoft briefly lowered the number of chats a user could engage in per session to try and address the issue.
Microsoft is hoping the new OpenAI-powered Bing can take on the company's old rival, Google Search.
Bing users have engaged in over half a billion chats since its launch, the blogpost said. In March, just over a month after the company launched the AI version of its search engine, Bing exceeded 100 million daily active users.
The Thursday blogpost didn't explain when the updates would be implemented but said the company would share more details at its Microsoft Build conference later this month.