Microsoft Drops Sign-In Requirement for its Bing Chatbot

After Microsoft removed the waitlist for its AI-powered Bing earlier this month, the company has just made another change to make the chatbot even more accessible. Starting today, Microsoft is allowing everyone to use the chatbot without being signed in with a personal Microsoft.

According to Michael Schechter, VP of Growth and Distribution at Microsoft, this change will roll out gradually, though unauthenticated users will be restricted to 5 chat turns per session. To keep going, users can still open Bing in another tab and start chatting again.

As some of you have noticed, we’ve started rolling out unauthenticated chat access on Bing. Seeing only 5 chat turns per session? Sign in to have longer conversations.

— Michael Schechter (@mikeschechter) May 17, 2023

For users signed in with a Microsoft account, the Bing Chatbot now supports up to 20 turns per conversation and up to 200 sessions per day. This week, Microsoft also started rolling out a new chat history feature that lets Bing users continue mobile conversations on the desktop and vice versa.

Microsoft announced earlier this month that Bing users have engaged in over half a billion chats in just 90 days. Bing has also crossed 100 million daily active users, and Microsoft intends to maintain this momentum by integrating its chatbot into its Edge browser, Switfkey mobile keyboard, and the Windows 11 taskbar.

It certainly took some time, but Google is getting ready to offer a proper response to Microsoft’s Bing chatbot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. At its I/O 2023 developer conference last week, Google announced that it’s bringing generative AI features to the top of its search results page. This new “Search Generative Experience” will be launching in preview in the US in the coming weeks.