JAKARTA - Microsoft announced a major update to its Bing chatbot on Thursday 4 May which added image and video answers, restaurant bookings, chat history, and smarter Microsoft Edge integration. This new feature also coincides with Microsoft making Bing Chat available to anyone for trial, switching from private preview to public preview.
Perhaps the biggest addition is the new feature Actions on Bing Chat and Edge. Now you can use Microsoft's Bing AI to complete the task without having to navigate back and forth between websites. So, if search results recommend a restaurant, it can then find a suitable reservation time for you and help you order everything in the chat interface.
It also works via Edge, so if you're looking for a movie, you can ask Bing AI to play it for you, and will automatically select the right service and open the site to start playing movies. Microsoft hasn't included all the partners working with Bing and Edge Actions yet, but the company has shown OpenTable for restaurant and Apple TV bookings for movie searches, so it's safe to say that it will be supported when launched in the next few weeks.
Next is the results of image and video search directly inside Bing Chat. "We introduce richer and more visual answers including updated graphics and views from answers, helping you find the information you are looking for more easily," said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's chief consumer marketing officer, quoted by The Verge.
You will soon be able to search for Bing Chat and ask for photos or videos about objects, animals, places, and more. Microsoft is also developing its Bing Image Creator for more than 100 languages, so you can easily use Bing Chat to create images.
Microsoft also added a highly requested feature to Bing Chat: history. This new chat history will allow you to continue chatbot conversations on various devices and even use Bing Chat as a research tool. Microsoft also plans to add export features and share with Bing Chat so you can share conversation content on Twitter or even bring it to Word documents.
Where chat history becomes so interesting is in Microsoft Edge. If you open a link from the Bing Chat answer on Edge, it will automatically move the chat to the sidebar so you can keep asking questions while browsing the site. Microsoft is also testing the personalization of this chat session by bringing context from the previous chat history into a new conversation.
Edge compose's cydebar feature also gets a better tone option to generate text, with Edge mobile also immediately supporting the context of the page so you can ask questions on Bing Chat about the pages you open, such as the sidebar on the desktop version.
"We believe that this will be a game changer in the search and to advance opportunities for developers in the search," Mehdi said. "We look forward to sharing more details on the Microsoft Build event later this month."
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