What you need to know
- Microsoft rolled out several improvements to Bing Chat last week.
- The service is now faster, supports more chats per session, and has improved contextual understanding.
- It's now easier to share Bing Chat responses through social media as well.
Microsoft ships improvements to Bing Chat preview each week. Last week, the chatbot gained support for more chats per session, increased its speed when set to "Balanced," and got better at understanding messages in context.
Microsoft also added a new option to share chat responses through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or email.
The Sidebar of the Edge browser gained Bing Chat and Compose last week as well. To use those features, you must sign up for the new Bing and be granted access by Microsoft.
The company clarified why some people are able to sign up for the new Bing without waiting. The Bing Blog post recapping last week's changes noted that Microsoft is testing an onboarding experience that allows some people to receive access right away.
Since that accelerated onboarding is in limited testing, you should follow our guide on how to sign up for the new Bing to get access by adding your name to the wait list. If you're lucky, you won't have to wait at all.
Here's everything that rolled out to Bing last week:
- Adding Bing Chat and Compose to the Edge Sidebar: Users on Edge v111.0.1661.41 and newer will now see the new Bing icon in the sidebar which includes Chat and Compose experiences designed for Bing chat. These experiences will appear if you already have access to the new Bing preview—but if not, you can join the waitlist from the same location. Previously, new Bing experiences in the sidebar were only available in the Edge Dev browser version.
- Testing faster responses: We are testing an optimization on “Balanced” mode that significantly improves performance—resulting in shorter but much faster responses. Responses in the Precise & Creative tones remain unchanged.
- Increasing Chat Turns to 15/150: We've increased the maximum number of turns you can have in a single conversation with Bing from 10 to 15. The total number of turns per day has also increased from 120 to 150.
- Sharing chat responses: We've added the ability to share Bing chat responses with others in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, email, or using a persistent link.
- Improving contextual understanding: We’ve improved the ability for Bing to absorb larger amounts of context in Creative tone conversations. This expanded context window allows for better grounding, improved summarization of longer documents and pages, and longer conversations.
- Including the group in Skype chats with Bing: We announced last month that you can chat with Bing in Skype. You can now skip the line and use the Bing preview in Skype with your friends. Simply join a group chat where at least one person is approved, add Bing as a participant, and everyone can talk with it regardless of their waitlist status. To chat with Bing, simply add @Bing at the beginning of your message.
