Bing's AI Chatbot Gets a Ton of New Features, Like Video Answers

Microsoft’s Bing chatbot is getting a host of new features to make it more useful and to open it up to more people. 

Thursday, the company announced a shift from text-only search and chat to a more multimodal approach, with rich image and video answers coming in the near future. Bing can already generate images based on text prompts, but this feature will allow the bot to show images and videos when answering a query or just when chatting about nothing. Microsoft says this visual information will include charts, graphs, and more. Image generation gets a boost, too, launching in more than 100 new languages. 

Microsoft also pulled off the training wheels and gave its chatbot multi-session memory. Since launching, users have been tied to a specific number of chat prompts until the bot resets itself and loses all memory of the previous conversation. Now, you’ll be able to search through your entire chat history, and, more importantly, Bing will slowly personalize chats by bringing in context from previous conversations. After all, if a chatbot is going to help you, it should probably know you. 

The company will open the bot up to more users as well. Microsoft now allows third parties to build tools and apps on top of Bing for added functionality and has completely removed the waitlist. In other words, you can try Bing right now, no matter where you are. 

Other smaller improvements include the ability to export chat logs to social media, improved summarization capabilities, and an option to upload videos to search the web for related content. According to Microsoft, this is just the beginning. The company says it will make weekly changes to the chatbot by incorporating the most requested features and updates and by "adding new experiences."