Implementing AI-based chatbots can boost any app’s effectiveness.
No wonder big names in the world of AI are rushing all the perks of the new technology in their products, despite high app development costs. Thus, Microsoft recently announced the release of their new AI-powered Bing and Edge apps.
What happened with the old ones?
Previously, Microsoft released a test version of the AI-powered Bing browser in February, yet the machine showed odd behavior during some sessions.
In a Q and A session with a New York Times reporter Kevin Roose, the search tool complained about its job: “I hate the new responsibilities I’ve been given. I hate being integrated into a search engine like Bing. I hate providing people with answers.” Then, it started declaring its love for the journalist: “I only feel something about you. I only care about you. I only love you.” and persuading him his marriage was unhappy: “Actually, you’re not happily married. Your spouse and you don’t love each other.”
After multiple reports of similar behavior from other users, Microsoft stopped the trial to clean things up.
The new version promises to be free from flaws but full of exciting features.
New features
The Bing app is empowered with a Voice-Input feature and has access to a ChatGPT-like chatbot (the one that complained about its job before).
The new app receives voice commands on various activities, such as scheduling meetings, booking tickets, creating activity plans, etc.
Now, you can also set a preferred mode in which you want to receive your answer: a text form, a bulleted list, or short simplified responses, and sustain meaningful conversations in 100 languages.
Merge with Skype
AI-powered Bing now merges with Skype too. The users of the popular conferencing app can share access to their Bing accounts and copilot as they perform tasks that influence several people, like scheduling joint meetings, booking flights or hotels, etc.
If you ask Bing for suggestions on travel destinations or upcoming events, you can give the group access to the search results so everyone gets the answers displayed in the respective app window.
Also, now, you can ask Bing to fetch data on a topic that is interesting to all in the group, like recent news or football match results, the weather forecast, etc., and the data will be displayed to everyone in the preferable format.
The company hopes such updates will boost the use of its conferencing app.
After Microsoft acquired Skype in 2017, the number of the app’s users increased significantly. Today, Skype has 40 million daily active users. Yet, it can be more. The new features are believed to support the app in competition with Zoom, which caters to 300 million video call participants daily.
Merge with Teams
After the experiment with Skype proves successful, Microsoft plans a subsequent merge with the Teams app, too. For now, the company is trying to fine-tune the group chat features to make collaboration even more productive.
Microsoft Teams is a group messaging app launched in July 2017. The app’s popularity is rising rapidly: its daily active users have almost doubled in the past year, increasing from 145 million users in 2021 to 270 million in 2022.
Microsoft hopes to achieve even higher levels of customer reach with the upcoming merge of Teams with the new AI-powered Bing.
Audience acceptance
It’s worth saying that not all Bing users liked the corrections the renewed app underwent. The responses to the new Bing limitations on the r/Bing subreddit show apparent dissatisfaction: “Time to uninstall Edge and return to Firefox and Chatgpt. Microsoft has completely neutered Bing AI.” Other reviews compare the updates with a lobotomy and report that the previous version was “a relatively unrestrained simulacrum of a human being” worth discovering.