Microsoft's Bing chatbot is getting a number of new features to make it more useful and available to more people.
Meet Bing's New AI Chatbot
On Thursday, the company announced a shift from text-only search and chat to a more multimodal approach, with rich image and video responses coming soon. Bing can already generate images from text prompts, but this feature will allow the bot to show images and videos when answering a question or simply chatting about nothing. Microsoft says this visual information will include charts, graphs and more. Image generation is also getting a boost, with the launch in more than 100 new languages.
Microsoft also took the training wheels off and gave its chatbot multi-session memory. Since launch, users have been locked into a set number of chat prompts before the bot resets itself and loses all memory of the previous conversation. Now, you can search through your entire chat history and, more importantly, Bing will slowly personalize chats by pulling context from past conversations. After all, if a chatbot is going to help you, it needs to know you.
The company will also be opening up the bot to more users. Microsoft is now allowing third parties to build tools and apps on Bing for added functionality, and has removed the waitlist entirely. In other words, you can try out Bing right now, wherever you are.
