It’s only been three months since Microsoft launched AI-powered versions of Bing and the Edge browser. It’s been a wild ride since the tech company boldly filed a claim for a larger slice of the search pie. AI-enhanced Bing said something about it weird thingsposed a serious threat AI developments from Googleand won 100 million daily users. They’re small potatoes compared to Google’s market share, with users in the billions, but as Microsoft vice president Yusuf Mehdi said, “it feels good to be at the dance.” Now Microsoft isn’t just at the dance, it’s leading the conga line.
Thursday’s announcement marks the next chapter in Microsoft’s plans to make Bing and Edge as useful as possible with AI. With the new Bing and Edge updates, you can search for multimedia, track your chat history as you browse the web, export and share conversations, and use a new feature called “actions” to help you complete tasks. In addition, Bing, previously in limited preview, is now available to everyone.
Read on for the full rundown of all the new Bing and Edge announcements.
Samsung can replace Google Search with AI-powered Bing on all devices
Visual search when words can not express
Bing Chat now supports more visual input and output in a number of different ways. In a Bing conversation, the responses include images, videos, and even graphs and charts.
Bing has more visual responses for us visual creatures.
Credit: Microsoft
Microsoft is also expanding its multimodal capabilities, which means it can understand images and videos you share. For example, you can upload an image of a sweater your friend wore and he will find similar examples for you to buy. Microsoft recently announced that image maker, which uses OpenAI’s DALL-E model to generate images from a text prompt. This feature is now available for over 100 languages.
Finally your chat history is saved
Microsoft provided one of the most requested features, which was the ability to save and share Bing conversations. Soon you will be able to see a log of all your sessions in Bing Chat.
Now you can finally access your chat history and pick up where you left off.
Credit: Microsoft
When you click on one of the linked articles in the answer, the Bing answer appears in the Edge sidebar next to the article. Microsoft already announced a Bing chatbot is in the sidebar in the Edge browser. This builds on that feature by populating the sidebar with context about what you searched for so you don’t have to switch back and forth between tabs.
The Bing sidebar follows you to the referenced page, so you don’t have to switch back and forth.
Credit: Microsoft
You can also share chat conversations, an option that includes the original prompt and answer, or you can export a conversation to a PDF, text file, or Word document.
Bing is now explaining itself more
Have you ever asked Bing to summarize a long document or web page but wondered about its accuracy or hallucinatory propensity? Bing now has a version of “Show Your Work” that teachers would love.
Let’s say you ask Bing to summarize an academic paper in the Edge sidebar on the open page. The summary will show footnotes of where it got that information, or you can send a follow-up prompt asking you where it got a specific detail of the article from and highlighting that part of the text. It’s a reassuring feature that lets users look into the black box a bit.
‘Actions’ speak more than… doing things yourself
“Actions” is a new feature that brings AI a little closer to doing tasks for you. Using the Edge browser, you can ask Bing to find streaming options for a movie and get it for you. You can also ask it to help with various settings related to the browser, such as asking to group tabs by theme, or asking to import passwords from another browser.
Actions take AI a step further to do everything for you.
Credit: Microsoft
Third Party Plugins
Last but not least, Microsoft is following in OpenAI’s footsteps by adding third-party plugins to Bing Chat. Soon you will be able to add a plug-in for sites like OpenTable and use Bing to find restaurants and make reservations.
Bing now has plugins just like ChatGPT.
Credit: Microsoft