Microsoft’s Big Chat is evolving at a rapid pace as the company continues to bring improvements and expand its AI search engine. In a blog post, Microsoft details what changes it made to the GPT-4 powered chatbot. Those changes include upping the usage limits to 20 chat turns over 10 sessions per day, as well as support for image and video search.
Before last week, users were limited to 150 chat turns each day, which are spread over 10 sessions of 15 turns per days. Microsoft has increased the allowance to 20 turns per session and 200 chat turns per day. As Bing continues to improve, we can expect the company to keep incrementally increase usage access.
Of course, Bing Chat remains in preview but when it does fully launch users should be getting unlimited sessions and turns.
Also last week, Microsoft says that Bing Chat now allows users to search for images and videos within in the chat prompt box. Results for visual content appear under the chat as answer cards. Users can then click “See more2 to be sent to the standard Bing image search for more related content.
This development is possible due to the GPT-4 support in Bing Chat. Microsoft integrated OpenAI’s latest natural language processing model into the AI search last month. GPT-4 is a multimodal AI, which means it provides natural language responses, image generation, and video generation.
Bringing Smaller Improvements to AI Search
In its blog post, Microsoft also discusses other smaller changes it has made to Bing Chat over the last week:
- “Bringing the context enhancements announced on March 17 to Edge sidebar, helping you summarize much larger pages and documents.
- Supporting Bing Image Creator in Edge sidebar (in Creative mode).
- Making the sidebar load faster and preventing it from loading with a blank screen at first launch.
- Preventing conversation resets that occurred when Edge was left running for a long time.”
The Last Week with Bing Chat
Microsoft’s blog does not cover everything that happened with Bing Chat over the last week. It has been a busy few days for the search engine, including Microsoft confirming that it will bring ads to the chatbot. Microsoft says with Bing Chat it wants to “drive more traffic to publishers in this new world of search”.
In the post, Yusuf Mehdi, the company’s Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, says:
“The early progress is encouraging. Based on our data from the preview, we are driving more traffic from all types of users. We have brought more people to Bing/Edge for new scenarios like chat and we are seeing increased usage. Then, we have uniquely implemented ways to drive traffic to publishers including citations within the body of the chat answers that are linked to sources as well as citations below the chat results to “learn more” with links to additional sources.”
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