Bing is picking up a gear. Microsoft will let everyone try the new version of its AI-powered search engine and plans many other substantial updates, Microsoft announced in a press release on May 4.
Main novelty: artificial intelligence based on GPT-4 is now available to everyone. You could already chat with the chatbot version and ask questions, but not use the AI-powered web search features. No need to wait in the waiting list, just go to the Edge browser and log into your Microsoft account, while to access GPT-4, you still need to pay for a subscription to the OpenAI service.
Microsoft is also adding an important new feature: Actions. If in the result of your search, the AI offers you to book a trip, a restaurant, see a movie… you can book it or read it directly from the chat interface without having to go through another site.
Coming soon multimodal research
Bing AI can also match your searches with images and videos pulled from the web. Still with images, you can now generate new images from a simple description written in a hundred languages, thanks to an update to Bing Image Creator.
Microsoft has announced other important updates coming soon: chat history will soon be preserved and exportable to keep track of your searches. AI will be even better at summarizing the content of documents or web pages.
Finally, Microsoft is “starting work” on a major addition: multimodal search. Basically, it will be possible to specify your request to the AI by adding an image, and not just text anymore. A function that GPT-4 is already capable of, according to OpenAI, but is not yet accessible to the general public.
Source: BFM TV
