Microsoft’s semi-secretive media event ended moments ago and the company has taken the wraps off its next generation browsing and search experience which will include new tools such as chat and compose powered by artificial intelligence.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to a small stage in a relatively intimate and semi-informal meeting area to tell attendees of its latest event that the company is making good on its investments of AI over the years with an updated Bing and Edge experience that should be coming to users in the coming months.
AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search. Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.
A handful of Microsoft executives followed Nadella’s rhetorical salvo with the details of how the new integration of AI would work alongside search and web browsing in Bing and Edge often likening the new experiences to having an AI copilot.
Microsoft is promising the following updates to users search and web browsing experiences through a reinvented Edge and Bing.
- Better search. The new Bing gives you 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 you want them.
- Complete answers. Bing reviews results from across the web to find and summarize the answer you’re looking for. For example, you can get 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.
- A new chat experience. 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 you to refine your search until you 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.
- A creative spark. There are times when you need more than an answer – you need inspiration. The new Bing can generate the content to help you. It can help you write an email, create a 5-day itinerary for a dream vacation to Hawaii, with links to book your travel and accommodations, prep for a job interview or create a quiz for trivia night. The new Bing also cites all its sources, so you’re able to see links to the web content it references.
- New Microsoft Edge experience. We’ve updated the Edge browser with new AI capabilities and a new look, and we’ve added two new functionalities: Chat and compose. With the Edge Sidebar, you 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. You can also ask Edge to help you compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get you started. After that, you can ask it to help you update the tone, format and length of the post. Edge can understand the web page you’re on and adapts accordingly.
Of course, Microsoft credits its relatively new partner OpenAI with being able to deliver its new Edge and Bing experiences as they leverage the company’s next-generation language models that are “more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search.”
Microsoft also developed its own proprietary method to work with OpenAI models dubbed the Prometheus model which is aimed at delivering relevant, timely, and targeted results with greater safety.
When applying AI to its core search algorithm, Microsoft says it saw the biggest leap in relevant answers delivered in “two decades.”
Microsoft has opened the new Bing search experience up to a limited audience in preview for now. For those interested, you can head here to join the waitlist.
