With Bing Chatbot Now Open to All, Microsoft to Redesign Microsoft Edge

Microsoft announced this morning that its AI-powered Bing chatbot is now available in open preview, meaning it’s available for anyone to try. The firm also revealed that it will make the Bing chatbot extensible by third-party developers to expand its capabilities and that it will soon release a “sleeker and enhanced user interface” for Microsoft Edge.

“I’m thrilled to share we are moving to the next generation of AI-powered Bing and Edge to transform the largest category of software in the world–search–by greatly expanding the vision and capabilities we think of as Your Copilot for the Web,” Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi writes in the announcement post. “We are opening up Bing to more people by moving from Limited Preview to Open Preview and eliminating the waitlist for trial.”

Here’s what’s changing.

• Though it is still in preview, Bing AI is now open to everyone. Well, anyone using Microsoft Edge, that is: if you try to open it in another browser, Microsoft will inform you that you need to use Edge.
• In addition to offering text-based search and chat capabilities, Bing AI can also work visually with “rich image/video answers” using the Bing Image Creator. And soon, this will be expanded to include “new multimodal support.” (This means that visual search will be incorporated into chat, allowing you to upload images and search the web for related content.)
• Bing AI is also adding history and persistent chats within Edge. To date, chats have been standalone, or single-use, and were not saved.
• Bing AI is become extensible, with Microsoft opening it up as a platform that developers and third parties can build on top of. This will let Bing help people take more actions on their queries and complete more tasks.

That platform bit is, perhaps, the most interesting part of the announcement, as developers will be able to extend Bing AI will plug-ins.

“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,” Mehdi explains. “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. We are working with our partners at OpenAI to make it easier and as consistent as possible for developers to take advantage of this opportunity. We believe these types of skills are a game-changer in the reinvention of search and to advance opportunities for developers in search. We look forward to sharing more details at Microsoft Build later this month.”

Additionally, Microsoft announced that it is redesigning Microsoft Edge, which is intriguing given how bloated the browser has become. “You’ll begin to see a sleeker and enhanced user interface including a streamlined look, rounded corners, organized containers, and semi-transparent visual elements,” Mehdi says.