Microsoft would be introducing its new ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine for preview in India and two other markets soon. The artificial intelligence-led chatbot, which was launched last November, would also allow users to create better images as part of the preview package, a senior company official has said.
Microsoft’s corporate VP and consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi said the search has better features than its rival Google with new capabilities of AI and chat making it more exciting for users seeking answers to their search queries. ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI and launched last November in a trial format.
The official said the shift from regular search to making it a copilot for the web was one of the key visions provided by CEO Satya Nadella when he took over Microsoft. Besides refining search better, the new Bing provides better answers to queries with the AI-powered chatbot also supporting content creation from ground up.
Over 100 million active users and growing
Microsoft said it was having more than 100 million daily active users on Bing out of 169 countries with India becoming one of the top three markets for the company for previewing the new product. Mehdi said India had also emerged as the top image creator market with more users now working on this feature provided by Bing.
The official also said India was chosen as a key market as more and more people from the country were active on Bing and were using several new features that Microsoft had recently added. The new Bing was also receiving positive feedback from its users across the world, and more specifically from India.
Chat and search cannot be separated
The ability to chat and search was something that most users were happy about and this was important for Microsoft as it marks the difference between Bing and Google when it comes to searching on the internet. Mehdi said he did not subscribe to Google’s theory that chat and search were separate products and at Microsoft it was considered one integrated product.
He also said Microsoft was continuously working to improve the factual accuracy of answers and things like math questions, searches about individual people require more work. Innovations like knowledge cards and stories were quite unique to Bing and puts Google at a disadvantage in the business, he added.
The official explained that when a user seeks an answer, an AI-led search can provide richer options such as listing out five different images of something that one has searched for. The knowledge card can provide multiple images of a celebrity and add multiple layers of information on those images for the user to choose from.
Creating sharper answers to top Indian queries
Microsoft has been working on automating some specific set of answers for the Indian market based on the top searches from this geography. It could be about actors or celebrities or movies and even top travel locations across India that we are developing special cards, says the Microsoft official.
Bing with the new AI can respond to complicated questions which regular searches cannot do, he said.
“One of the things that we’ve made progress with Bing is we’re now able to answer those questions, many of those questions that Google cannot do because we’re using ChatGPT to help refine… because we’re using AI to help answer the question,” he said.
On the question of how it can impact content creators, especially in the field of news and current affairs, Mehdi said in the past users would be led by latest news and be led from there to snippets of information on which one clicks. With AI-enabled chat, the answers would be easier to find whereby the search engine drives more content to people and more traffic to content.
The official also held the view that these efforts would change the way news agencies and news publishers function besides changing the advertising models on the internet. There will be fewer ads that will be more relevant and have higher returns, Mehdi concluded.
