Microsoft's Bing Chat: A new experience

Microsoft has, just like OpenAI and Google, developed an AI-based chatbot that has with its siblings reshaped how we interact with machines and search engines. Just imagine a world where we don’t look up information in the traditional sense (which can be rather mechanical) but instead get our information in the shape of a conversation with a clever friend. That is essentially what Microsoft promises that their Bing Chat is going to be. We’ll look further into it here.

How Bing Chat came around

One of the frontiers in human-computer interaction is conversational interfaces. We’re seeing that technology is going through a renaissance and evolvement - even our cars, watches and fridges are smart now, which is something we are in the process of adapting to.

With even more smart-devices, users expect smooth and intuitive use of their devices, which includes IoT and chatbots.

Microsoft saw that the user’s need increased and thought of a system and technology that combined conversational interfaces with their search engine, Bing. Microsoft integrated NLP (natural language processing) algorithms to make a seamless and smooth conversational experience.

Bing Chat is essentially a chat-based search interface that is powered by AI technology. The AI technology allows users to interact and talk with the search engine using natural language questions or prompts - this eliminates the need for any specific keywords or Boolean operators. So instead of typing specific keywords, users can now ask intricate questions, get recommendations for recipes or books, and generally just have intelligent conversations with the Bing Chat.

Improved user engagement

Bing Chat has several intelligent features but one of the main advantages with the technology is its ability to actually engage in proper conversation with the users. Compared to traditional search engines, Bing Chat presents the information in a more attractive way so to speak. Search engines present a list of articles about the thing you asked for or looked up.

Bing Chat will engage in a conversation with you and answer the question as if you asked a friend for help. You can furthermore, since it’s a conversation you’re having, ask clarifying followup questions - which is something you often cannot do with the traditional search engines.

Let’s say you’re planning a trip to go to a city. Instead of looking up the weather, good restaurants and things to see individually, you can ask Bing Chat - all within the same chat window. The chatbot understands context so that each conversation, prompt, and question can relate to what you previously wrote and asked about. This makes the conversation more fluent and enjoyable - you can literally spend a good deal of time conversing with chatbots (whether ChatGPT, Bard or Bing Chat).

An intellectual tool

As with any other advanced chatbot, Bing Chat gathers information from the entire internet - otherwise we wouldn’t get these quick and coherent answers. But these advanced chatbots can also analyze past interactions and search patterns, so they can give you a more personalized experience with recommendations tailored to your needs and preferences that it has learned previously.

That can both be movie recommendations, restaurants you’d like, or products that Bing Chat think you’d like.

• A personal assistant: Besides being a very consumer-oriented technology, the chatbot also functions as a valuable tool for professionals, both for individuals and organizations. The chatbots are essentially a little personal research assistant right at your fingertips. Whether you need some market insights, trends you need to follow or any references, chatbots are your helper.

• Better accessibility: Another important thing that Bing Chat - and chatbots in general - does is to make the digital world a lot more accessible to everyone. People with e.g. disabilities can utilize the technology to navigate through the internet more efficiently. This also ensures that they just as easily can access what they want. But the key feature here is also the ability to interact via either speech or text - removing the limitations all together.

The Future of Search

If we look towards the future of chatbots and Bing Chat, it cannot be anything else than a bright and exciting future. Technology is in constant evolution and advances as the months go by - this will offer even more opportunities in sophisticated tech. Chatbots will make it easy for translations and real-time language tutoring - in the end it’s only us who set the limits. It’s giving a little glimpse into the future of human-computer interaction, which most likely will become very seamless and intuitive.

Bing Chat is much more than a search engine - it’s a tool that helps us in our everyday lives and it will change the way we interact with computers. Combining AI and NLP, chatbots change the way we learn, research and discover new information. We at Moxso believe that the future of AI and chatbots is bright and it will help us streamline our work. We can’t really avoid the development of AI technology, so why not see the practicality of it? Now we’re moving towards a time where we interact with computers without even thinking about it.