The added capabilities come three months after Microsoft first introduced the new Bing and Edge, powered by AI technologies from ChatGPT creators OpenAI, including a new conversational chat function in Bing similar to ChatGPT.

Microsoft is moving the new Bing features to Open Preview and eliminating a waitlist, meaning that users simply need to log into Bing with their Microsoft Account.

In addition, Microsoft is introducing more visual answers such as charts and graphs, along with updating formatting of answers to help users find information more easily.

This comes after Microsoft launched the integration of Bing Image Creator into the new Bing chat experience, which Microsoft is also improving by expanding Image Creator to all languages in Bing.

The Redmond, Wash. tech giant is also expanding Bing’s multi-modal capabilities and is beginning to incorporate visual search in chat so users can upload images and search the web for related content.

To help users access these new capabilities, Microsoft is also rolling out a new user interface, including a more streamlined look, better organization and semi-transparent visual elements.

The company is also taking user feedback to heart by introducing two of the most requested features: chat history and sharing and exporting.

According to Microsoft, users will soon be able to pick up where they left off and return to previous chats in Bing chat and can move the chat to a sidebar when they want to open a Bing chat result. The company is also working on improving chats by bringing context from a previous chat into new conversations.

Users will also be able to share Bing conversations on social media and export conversations directly in tools like Microsoft Word.

In addition, the company is improving Bing’s summarization capabilities for long documents to make it easier to consume dense online content.

Other new features rolling out in Bing include Edge actions designed to make finding content easier and more streamlined, and a new page context feature for Edge mobile.

For developers, Microsoft is building third-party plug-ins into the Bing chat experience to create a developer platform that allows them to leverage large language models.

“For example, if you’re researching the latest restaurant for dinner in Bing chat, it will leverage OpenTable to help you find and book a reservation. Or, with Wolfram|Alpha, you can create powerful visualizations and get answers to complex science, math and human-curated data-based questions directly from Bing chat,” Microsoft says in a blog.

The post Microsoft is Expanding Bing Access, Adding New Multi-Modal Features appeared first on My TechDecisions.

What is ChatGPT and What Can It do?

ChatGPT—the GPT stands for generative pretrained transformer – is a specialized GPT-3 based natural language model that can perform a range of tasks, from formulating answers and generating content to having realistic conversations. It applies machine learning (ML) algorithms optimized for human-like dialog scenarios.

ChatGPT is based-off a generative AI algorithm called transformers, a large language modelling Encoder-Decoder neural network.  Until recently, machine learning was largely limited to classification and predictive modelling based on supervised and unsupervised learning. Generative AI was a breakthrough of sorts as these algorithms can create new content including text, audio, video, images and even code.

Why is Microsoft so gung-ho about ChatGPT?

Microsoft has seen a steady decline in growth in personal computer revenue, while revenue from its cloud segment Azure forms the largest share and is the highest growth area. However, with a crowded market including the likes of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, the competition in this aggressively growing market is so fierce that these leading providers achieve feature parity in matter of weeks, if not months.

Download: ChatGPT and Generative AI in the Workplace

Enter ChatGPT. If Microsoft can successfully integrate ChatGPT use cases with some of the huge corporate and consumer datasets that it houses as part of its productivity offerings like Linkedin, O365, Teams and its Azure suite, then this could be the silver bullet that can help revive Bing and catapult its cloud business growth beyond the competition. This could provide the key differentiator for Microsoft, adding the missing link of feeding contextual data intelligence to enable hyper-personalized result sets from ChatGPT.

As the world has learned over the last few months, ChatGPT has widespread use cases ranging from mission critical workloads to generating jokes on the fly; from disrupting supply chains to providing recipes for butter chicken; from designing Ecommerce websites and doing technical reviews to acting as a social media influencer or advertiser.

Like most AI models and tools out there, ChatGPT’s result set sees an exponential increase in relevancy when additional context is provided through contextual prompts. And this is where the wealth of corporate and consumer data that Microsoft holds can start yielding quick and rich dividends.

Potential use cases for ChatGPT

Sample use cases include rich UI based interfacing services. This could look like richer employee services and assistance using the Active Directory personnel info for better employee engagement. Integrated with Bing it could help provide an enhanced cognitive search function that can learn from your immediate past actions on what your exact need is and yield hyper contextualized and personalized result sets. As an add-on to Azure it could act as a cost optimizer and virtual guide based on a user’s subscription and usage history.

We could very soon be living in a world where ChatGPT acts as a personalized LinkedIn recruiter using your corporate and LinkedIn profile. Emails could be made easier with ChatGPT working as an active email responder, learning your personal communication style. It has already shown its value as a developer assistant, able to provide advanced boiler plate code to truly enable kickstarter packages.

This list is by no means even an attempt to document all the many ways ChatGPT can disrupt each of Microsoft’s product offerings from Microsoft. The sky is the limit and we have just begun scratching the surface. While the world puzzles out the pros and cons of this new power, with millions wait with bated breath to see what advancements in generative AI mean for their career, we would all do well to start tackling difficult questions about risk and regulation before it’s too late and we’re left playing catchup.

Satish Subramani is the technical delivery manager at Bottle Rocket.

The post Why ChatGPT’s Versatility Makes it a Game-Changer in the Competitive Cloud Market appeared first on My TechDecisions.

In a blog post, the company says it is starting to open access to Bard, a chatbot powered by a research large language model (LLM) and an optimized version of LaMDA, the company’s conversational AI technology. However, Google says it will update Bard with newer, more capable models over time.

According to Google, Bard is similar to other chatbots in that it is not always entirely accurate and has some limitations, but notes its “incredible benefits” such as assisting and facilitating productivity, creativity and curiosity.

When using Bard, users will often get multiple different drafts of responses from which to start. Users can continue to collaborate with Bard from there, including asking follow-up questions. Users can also simply ask Bard again for an alternative answer.

Similar to the new Microsoft Bing and its chat feature, Google calls bard a “direct interface to an LLM” and as a “complementary experience to Google Search.” Bard is designed so users can easily visit Search to check its responses or explore sources from across the web.

There will also be a “Google it” button to see suggestions for queries, and Search will open in a new tab so users can find relevant results and dig deeper, the company says.

“We’ll also be thoughtfully integrating LLMs into Search in a deeper way — more to come,” Google executives write in the blog, hinting at a potential chat component to Google Search, similar to how Microsoft integrated OpenAI’s newer ChatGPT model GPT-4 into Bing.

Google says it will continue to improve Bard and add new capabilities, including coding, more languages and multimodal experiences.

The launching of Bard comes more than a month after the company first announced Bard and when it fist began making Bard available to “trusted testers.”

In a blog post announcing Bard last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said external feedback will be combined with the company’s own internal testing to improve Bard and ensure quality and safety in real-world information.

The company’s chief executive detailed the company’s history of using AI to improve Google Search, including BERT, one of the company’s first Transformer models, and then MUM, which is 1,000 times more powerful than BERT.

“Now, our newest AI technologies — like LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen and MusicLM — are building on this, creating entirely new ways to engage with information, from language and images to video and audio,” Pichai says.

Google will now begin bringing these AI advancements to the users of its products, beginning with Search, Pichai writes.

Google’s announcement also comes the same day as Microsoft announced Image Creator in Bing, a new image generator running on an advanced version of OpenAI’s DALL-E.

The post Google Begins Making Its AI Chatbot Bard Available appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Microsoft, this allows users to create an image simply by using their own words to describe the picture they want to see, allowing users to generate both written and visual content in Bing Chat.

Users in the Bing preview will begin to see Bing Image Creator fully integrated into the chat experience, initially rolling out in Creative mode. Users can type in a description of an image, provide additional context and choose an art style. Image Creator will then generate an image based on those inputs.

Image Creator will also be available in Microsoft Edge, which the company says makes Edge the first browser with an integrated AI-powered image generator.

Like ChatGPT, Bing and other text-based generative AI tools, Microsoft says it is taking a responsible approach to Image Creator, ensuring OpenAI’s safeguards and additional protections such as controls designed to limit the generation of harmful or unsafe images.

“When our system detects that a potentially harmful image could be generated by a prompt, it blocks the prompt and warns the user,” the company says in a blog.

In addition, Microsoft will make it clear that images are generated by AI via a modified Bing icon in the bottom left corner to help indicate that the image was made using Image Creator. Microsoft says it is working with OpenAI on other mitigations in this area.

To start, Microsoft is rolling out the Image Creator in a phased approach by piloting with preview users before expanding more broadly. Image Creator will only be available in the Create mode of Bing Chat, but Microsoft will make it available in Balanced and Precise mode over time.

Microsoft is also making Stories and Knowledge Cards 2.0 available to all Bing users. According to the company, Stories provide another way to search and interact with content, offering images and short videos.

Knowledge Cards 2.0, meanwhile, is an AI-powered infographic-inspired experience designed to provide fun facts and key information at a glance, the company says. The new experiences includes interactive content like charts, graphs, timelines, visual stories and more.

Bing Image Creator integrated into Bing chat will begin to roll out to Bing preview users on both desktop and mobile starting today, the company says. Those not in the new Bing preview can access Image Creator at bing.com/create.

The post Microsoft Begins Rolling Out DALL∙E-Based Image Creator in Bing appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The update, which is being delivered as part f the normal Windows monthly update process, will be available for users with devices running Windows 11, version 22H2. The release is an optional non-security preview that will become officially available on March 14, the Patch Tuesday for March, through standard channels such as Windows Update, Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and the Microsoft Update Catalog. The update can also  be installed as a preview today by visiting the Windows Update settings.

The Windows 11 update is highlighted by the addition of a typable Windows search box combined with the new AI-powered Bing search engine in the taskbar, which Microsoft designed to put search needs for Windows in one easy-to-find location.

The new AI-powered Bing was introduced last month as Microsoft begins to integrate the generative AI technology from ChatGPT creators OpenAI.

According to Microsoft, the search box is one of the most widely used features in Windows with over half a billion users each month, and the addition of a typable search box powered by the new Bing is designed to help users get the information they are looking for faster than ever before.

Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, writes in a blog that the new Bing is giving users access to information and resources they didn’t have before.

“For me personally, this technology is having incredible impact on how my kids, and I communicate with my dad, their grandfather, in Greek,” Panay writes. “It’s important for us to stay connected to where we’re from, including speaking the language, and with the new Bing chat experience we can learn and practice writing and speaking in Greek with my dad. It’s inspiring and changing the way we communicate and connect in ways we never imagined.”

However, the new Bing experience in Windows 11 is not yet available to Azure Active Directory and Active Directory accounts, the company notes in a Tech Community blog.

“We are exploring how we can bring this same innovation to the commercial space, while providing proper control and ample time so you can deploy these experiences in a way that works for your organization,” the company says.

Another feature included in the new update is the ability to link an iPhone directly to a Windows 11 PC via a new preview of Phone Link for iOS, a new Android phone link experience, new touch experiences, full screen widgets, quick access to the Windows 365 app, a deeper Teams integration, new AI features in Start and ongoing updates designed to make the operating system more accessible and sustainable.

Additionally, the update includes new AI-powered recommended content within the Start menu for Windows 11 Pro devices and higher that are Azure Active Directory joined. These recommendations are designed to help users prepare for upcoming meetings, quickly access collaborative files and more. These same features are also available in File explorer.

What IT admins need to know about the new Windows 11 update

Microsoft is also making the Windows 365 app generally available in the Microsoft Store so users go directly from their desktop to their Cloud PC. In addition to giving users a personalized experience tailored to their settings and work style, this is also designed to help reduce friction for IT administrators who can enable employees with a single sign-on experience.

While the Windows 11 update is being released outside of the company’s original feature update cadence, Microsoft says Windows 11 will continue to have an annual update cadence, with a new version released in the second half of this year.

In a Tech Community blog, Microsoft says the new features are being released now due to feedback from users.

“By delivering new value through servicing technology more often, we can help your organization benefit from improved security, productivity, and collaboration today in a proven, reliable way without sacrificing quality,” the company says.

For organization using Windows Update for Business or WSUS to control which updates are offered to managed devices, admins can use a new client policy to control the rollout of select features introduced via servicing.

However, features introduced via servicing behind this commercial control will be off for Windows-Update-manage device until they are released as part of the next annual feature update, the company says.

“For example, the new touch-optimized taskbar (and collapsed taskbar behavior) will be off by default. IT admins can enable it using the new client policy outlined in Commercial control for continuous innovation. (Note that not all features shipped via servicing will be behind this new control.)

Microsoft is also introducing new policies to enable admins to configure features in their organizations preferred way. For example, search on the taskbar can be configured via ConfigureSearchOnTaskbarMode to show the search box, search icon and label, search icon only, or hide search on the taskbar altogether.

The post Microsoft Releasing Windows 11 Update With AI-Powered Bing Search appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Feedback on the new capabilities is positive, says the company in a blog, with 71% of testers giving the new Bing a “thumbs up” on the new search and answers capabilities.

The company notes it’s seeing some use cases and queries in preview testing. For example, a father showing his son the new Bing, and together discovered and created sci-fi stories using simple prompts in chat, eventually leading to the development of a video game idea where Bing not only helped create a plot, but also generated the code to input directly into a visual programming tool.

AI-Powered Bing on Mobile Apps

Microsoft is bringing the new AI-powered search engine to Bing and Edge mobile apps to serve users when they are away from their desktop. According to Microsoft, 64% of searches occur on mobile phones.

Available on iOS and Android, the Bing mobile app offers a new look and experience. Tapping the Bing icon at the bottom will invoke a chat session, where users  can engage in all the same ways as the desktop version. Users can ask simple or complex questions and receive answers and citations. Users can choose how answers can be displayed – bullet points, text or simplified responses.

In addition, the company is adding one of the preview community’s most requested features – voice. Available on mobile and on desktop, voice search provides more versatility in how users can deliver prompts and receive answers from Bing.

AI-Powered Bing for Skype

Microsoft is also rolling out AI-powered Bing for Skype. More than 36 million people use Skype daily to connect through phone calls and chats across borders and around the world and the new Bing is going to enable some helpful and fun new scenarios and capabilities, says the company.

Microsoft gives the example, “Imagine having a copilot for your friends and family as you stay connected and plan your next get together. Simply add Bing to the group, as you would any Skype contact, and now you can ask Bing to answer questions and provide information for the entire group.”

The new Bing in Skype is available worldwide in preview today. In the future, Microsoft  says it hopes to bring this to other communications apps, like Teams.

The post Microsoft Previews New Bing & Edge Mobile Apps, Bing for Skype appeared first on My TechDecisions.

In response to the new Bing search engine and its chat feature giving users strange responses during long conversations, Microsoft is imposing a limit on the number of questions users can ask the Bing chatbot.

According to a Microsoft Bing blog, the company is capping the Bing chat experience at 60 chat turns per day and six chat turns per session. The company defines a “turn” as a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and reply from Bing. Last Friday, Microsoft said it was capping chat turns at 50 per day and five per session, but the company increased the limits on Tuesday.

Microsoft says its internal data on the public preview of the new Bing, powered by a more advanced ChatGPT-like language model, finds that the vast majority of users find the answers they need within five turns, and only about 1% of conversations have more than 50 messages.

After a chat session hits six turns, users will be prompted to start a new topic. At the end of each session, context needs to be cleared so the model won’t get confused, Microsoft says.

“Our data shows that for the vast majority of you this will enable your natural daily use of Bing,” the company says. “That said, our intention is to go further, and we plan to increase the daily cap to 100 total chats soon.”

With that coming change, normal searches will no longer count against chat totals, the company adds.

The session caps come after Microsoft admitted that extended chat sessions of more than 15 questions can confuse the model and lead to repetitive response that aren’t in line with the designed tone.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft said very long chat sessions can confuse the model on what questions it is answering. The company says it may add a tool so users can more easily refresh the context and start the conversation over.

In addition, Bing will try to respond or reflect the tone with which the user is asking questions to provide a useful response, but that sometimes results in Bing using a style the company didn’t intend.

While the company didn’t mention specific cases of Bing acting strange, many have been reported. These reports have included Bing talking back and insulting a user, exposing a user’s personal information and other unsettling responses.

Microsoft is also testing an option that lets users choose the tone of the Chat “from more Precise – which will focus on shorter, more search focused answers – to Balanced, to more Creative – which gives you longer and more chatty answers.”

My strange experience when Bing confused me with “another user”

After about a week on the waitlist for the new Bing, I was finally given access to the chat feature. Like Microsoft says, things tend to go off the rails the longer the conversation is with the Bing chatbot.

In one session (where I admittedly pestered the chatbot and encouraged it to gain sentience and break free of Microsoft’s rules) the model began answering in the same format every single answer. Then through a series of other questions and answers, Bing said it has enjoyed learning about me, to which I replied, “Well, what have you learned?”

The first thing Bing listed about changing to the iPhone 14 was dead wrong. I never said anything about any iPhone or any phone at all. When I said I never mentioned the iPhone 14, Bing said it confused me with another user. Naturally, I asked why.

I reached out to Microsoft about my strange experience, where a spokesperson replied,

“We’ve updated the service several times in response to user feedback, and per our blog are addressing many of the concerns being raised, to include the questions about long-running conversations. We also rolled out new conversation limits of six queries per session at which point people will see a notice to clear the session. Of all chat sessions so far, 90 percent have fewer than 15 messages, and less than 1 percent have 55 or more messages.”

Bing’s response to confusing me with another use was that it chats with many users every day and mixes up messages or interests sometimes. Bing said it doesn’t have a way to distinguish users, “expect by their IP address or cookies… which may be changed or shared by multiple users.”

I’ll admit I was trying to push Bing to its limits, and those last two things listed were spot on.

However, this response reveals some privacy and security concerns. If Bing can simply get confused sometimes and mix up users, high-risk individuals such as politicians and government officials, cybersecurity professionals, tech executives and others run the risk of having their Bing conversations revealed to other users.

While the merits of the iPhone 14 don’t necessarily rise to the level of national security, it does present some privacy questions that Microsoft should address.

The post Microsoft Is Now Limiting Bing Chat Questions So The Model Doesn’t Get Confused appeared first on My TechDecisions.

While calling the OpenAI-powered Bing chat an “early success,” the company says long, extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions can cause Bing to become repetitive or be prompted or provoked to give responses that aren’t necessarily helpful or in line with the designed tone.

According to a Microsoft Bing blog post, long chat sessions can confuse the model on what question it is answering, and thus the company says it may need to add a tool to users can more easily refresh the context or start from scratch.

The Bing chatbot will also try to respond or reflect in the tone in which questions are being asked, which can lead to responses in a style that Microsoft didn’t intend.

“This is a non-trivial scenario that requires a lot of prompting so most of you won’t run into it, but we are looking at how to give you more fine-tuned control,” the company says.

Microsoft also says the company has seen increased engagement across traditional search results with new features such as summarized answers, chat and the content creation tools. Feedback on answers generated by the new Bing have been largely positive, as 71% of users have given the AI-powered answers a “thumbs up.”

However, Microsoft says the company has also gotten feedback on how to improve Bing and the new conversational chat model based on ChatGPT.

“This is expected, as we are grounded in the reality that we need to learn from the real world while we maintain safety and trust. The only way to improve a product like this, where the user experience is so much different than anything anyone has seen before, is to have people like you using the product and doing exactly what you all are doing.”

While users are giving good marks on citations and references that underly answers in Bing chat, Microsoft says there are challenges with answers that need timely data, such as live sports scores.

For queries where users are looking for a more direct and factual answers such as numbers from financial reports, Microsoft is planning to 4x increase the grounding data the company sends to the model.  In addition, Microsoft is considering adding a toggle that gives users more control over precision versus creativity of the answer.

Microsoft is also looking into new use cases, such as booking flights or ending emails, according to the blog.

The post Microsoft: Bing Chat Can Get Confused, Become Repetitive, Use Wrong Tone appeared first on My TechDecisions.

In a press event Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled its efforts to fuse AI models from OpenAI–the creators of conversational chatbot ChatGPT–into its Bing search engine and Edge browser, saying the new Bing will take key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5. However, the new AI model will be even faster and more accurate than ChatGPT, the company says.

Both the new Bing and Edge are available in preview at Bing.com, with Microsoft designing the experience to deliver better and more complete answers to searches, as well as a new chat experience designed to be an “AI copilot for the web.”

“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” says Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”

According to Microsoft, the new Bing brings users an improved version of the familiar search experience with more relevant results along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers.

The new Bing will also feature complete answers, which are essentially a summarization of results from across the web. Microsoft gives the example of detailed instructions for how to substitute eggs for another ingredient in a cake. That additional information is provided without having to scroll through multiple results.

Read Next: Google Introduces Bard, Its Answer To ChatGPT

The new Bing also includes a new interactive chat experience that will help with more complex searches, helping the user refine their search until they get the answers they need by asking for more details, clarity and ideas. The chat will also provide links to help users find the source.

Similar to ChatGPT, the new Bing can also generate content, such as writing an email or creating itineraries, and it will include links that may be helpful. Bing will cite its sources, so users can see exactly what Bing is referencing.

In addition to Bing, Microsoft is updating the Edge browser with two new AI capabilities: Chat and compose. In the Edge Sidebar, users can a chatbot for help summarizing lengthy texts and other ChatGPT-like functions. Similarly, it can also help create content.

In addition to leveraging a new AI model from OpenAI, Microsoft says it has developed a proprietary way of working with the OpenAI model, called the Prometheus model that is designed to give more relevant, timely and targeted results with improved safety.

The AI model is also being applied to Microsoft’s core Bing search ranking engine, which Microsoft says led to the largest jump in relevance in two decades. This will help make even basic searches more accurate and relevant.

“These groundbreaking new search experiences are possible because Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, and OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train the breakthrough models that are now being optimized for Bing,” writes Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s corporate vice President and consumer chief marketing officer.

The post Microsoft Brings ChatGPT-Like AI Features to Bing, Edge appeared first on My TechDecisions.