Ever since its initial announcement back in February, Microsoft has been making waves in the news with its Bing AI. Initially, the company only have access to the AI to a few via its limited preview. Over time, the company would be letting more and more people in the waitlist in. Now, the company has announced that it is doing away with the waitlist entirely, with the Bing AI now in open preview.
The announcement was made on the company’s blog, which notes that all you need now to access the Bing AI, as well as all of its features on the Edge browser, is a Microsoft account. On that note, the company also says that it will be making search results more visual, with charts and graphs being included into answers. Videos will also be added, according to the post.
Coming as a little bit of a surprise though is the announcement that Bing AI will be getting a chat history. This is odd because it’s something that’s available even for the free version of ChatGPT. But now that Microsoft is adding it to Bing, you will be able to continue a conversation that you’ve left off, or even share your conversations with the chatbot on social media. No idea why you’d want to do that, but the option exists for those who want to do so.
And finally, Microsoft will be building third-party plugin support for the Bing AI chatbot. As an example to the way this will work, the company mentions the chatbot being able to loop in OpenTable, an online restaurant-reservation service in the US, if you’re using Bing chat to look up places to have dinner.
Some of these new features are noted as “starting soon” in the Microsoft blog, so it’s unclear when exactly they will become available. But what is available immediately is the Bing AI chatbot itself, and if you’ve never bothered to give it a try because of the waitlist, now’s a good time as any to give it a go.
(Source: Microsoft)
