Microsoft has launched an all new, cutting edge AI-Powered BING search engine and edge browser to enhance user experience and productivity. At a private event held at its headquarters, the business revealed Bing is now running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customised specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it is even faster, more accurate and more capable.
Microsoft’s goal is to make information more accessible and help users be more productive and efficient in their work, bringing together search, browsing and chat into one unified experience users can invoke from anywhere on the web.
The new Bing gives an improved version of the familiar search experience, providing more relevant results for simple things like sports scores, stock prices and weather, along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers if users want them.
Bing will now also review results from across the web to find and summarise the answers users are looking for. For example, offering detailed instructions for how to substitute eggs for another ingredient in a cake you are baking right in that moment, without scrolling through multiple results.
For more complex searches – such as for planning a detailed trip itinerary or researching what TV to buy – the new Bing offers new, interactive chat. The chat experience empowers users to refine their search until they get the complete answer you are looking for by asking for more details, clarity and ideas – with links available so you can immediately act on your decisions.
Additionally, Microsoft have updated Edge browser with new AI capabilities and a new look, as well as two new functionalities: Chat and compose. With the Edge Sidebar, users can ask for a summary of a lengthy financial report to get the key takeaways – and then use the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table. Interestingly, Edge can now help users to compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get started.
Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer said: “To empower people to unlock the joy of discovery, feel the wonder of creation and better harness the world’s knowledge, today we’re improving how the world benefits from the web by reinventing the tools billions of people use every day, the search engine and the browse. There are 10 billion search queries a day, but we estimate half of them go unanswered. That’s because people are using search to do things it wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s great for finding a website, but for more complex questions or tasks too often it falls short.”
“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,”said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft at the event today. “We’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”
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