Ever since they launched Bing Chat, the AI-powered chatbot powered by OpenAI and DALL-E2 models, Microsoft appears to be on a roll. The company previewed some of what’s in store for users at an event in New York City. And, it goes without saying that most of the innovation is just an extension of what the company brought forth with the AI-led experiments.
At hand during the event were top executives of the company including Yusuf Mehdi, the CVP and consumer chief marketing officer, says a report published in Techcrunch. And leading up to the event, the officials made it clear that visitors to Bing had exceeded 100 million daily active users, creating over 200 million images and engaging in half-a-billion chats.
Make Bing more visually appealing
The immediate agenda appears to be to create a more visual Bing – anyone remember Google’s efforts in this direction more than a decade ago? While Google used image search to make the pages more colorful, Bing is using the image and graphical answers as the differentiator – the hope being that a more personalized solution will be more attractive to users.
Mehdi put it succinctly by stating that the company was underway with the transformation of search itself. “In our minds, we think that today will be the start of the next generation of this search mission,” he said in a statement. And the journey began with making Bing Chat freely available (without any waiting) to anyone with a Microsoft account.
It’s more of the same, but done better
The user experience isn’t really any different from when it launched. Just that Bing Chat will throw up images for search queries where they make more sense. During the demo, an official typed in a query to which Bing shared a paragraph alongside an image that were both directly related to the search query.
Of course, there is still no clarity of what percentage of queries will trigger an image though Microsoft says Bing chat already has filtering and moderation built in. In addition, it uses toxicity classifiers that helps it detect potentially harmful prompts and blacklists them instantly in order keep the chats relatively clean.
The debate is back on the principles
One of the key points that Microsoft addressed was on the issue of ensuring AI principles and tying them to product design. Officials said some headway had been made on this front with a team of human moderators set up to watch for abuse, even as others were attempting to use Bing chat to generate phishing emails.
Another new feature that officials shared was the ability of Bing Chat to create charts and graphs when given the right prompt and good data. Earlier, it would lead to some basic results but in the near future Bing would be able to present them in a much better visually appealing fashion in a chart type that the user can choose.
This could mean that Bing is moving into the space of offering a productivity platform in tandem with the enhanced text-toimage generation capabilities. In the weeks ahead, the Bing Image Creator would understand more languages besides English and be able to refine the images it generates with follow-up prompts.
