The waitlist to use Microsoft’s new AI powered search Bing – is over. It’s now in open preview. But you do need a Microsoft account to access Bing and its chatbot GPT-4. I’m using it on an M1 MacBook Pro right now with Microsoft’s Edge browser. I’m a big Google Chrome user but man… this Edge browser is so much faster.. it’s insane. Bing combines large language models like Open AI’s GPT-4 with Microsoft’s search index for conversational, cited results.
Oddly, it chose a Canadian time zone when I asked about flight arrival times. I wanted to know when a flight arrived in Dubai locally and what time that would convert to in Sydney. Obviously I’m in Sydney, Australia so I expected an answer related to my location. It wasn’t wrong but it didn’t get the more likely answer. (It ignored my typo as you can see in the screen grab below)
Then when I asked the same question it gave the right answer without complaint. Fascinating stuff.
In just 90 days users have engaged in over a half a billion chats and created over 200 million images with Bing Image Creator. All up, Bing has grown to exceed 100 million daily active users and daily installs of the Bing mobile app have increased 4X since launch. Bing has enjoyed eight straight quarters of growth in Microsoft Edge browser share.
It was a big day for Microsoft in search and this is what they announced.
- Opening up Bing to more people by moving from Limited Preview to Open Preview and eliminating the waitlist for trial.
- Moving from text-only search & chat to one that is incredibly more visual with rich image/video answers and coming shortly, new multimodal support.
- Moving from single use chat/search sessions to multi-session productivity experiences with chat history and persistent chats within Edge.
- Opening up platform capabilities so developers and third parties can build on top of Bing to help people take actions on their queries and complete tasks.
BING IMAGE CREATOR
Bing is the only search experience with the ability to generate both written and visual content in one place, from within chat. Now it’s available in more than 100 languages. Below you can see my example of a ‘football on a monkey’ with a real football. Not an American Football. Nice touch.
Microsoft is expanding multi-modal capabilities by incorporating visual search in chat so you will be able to upload images and search the web for related content.