Microsoft removes Bing waiting list and adds chat history

Microsoft On Thursday, it said it was cutting out a waiting list it had for the past three months for the revamped Bing search engine, allowing anyone with a Microsoft account to use it. The new Bing, unveiled in February, features an intelligent chatbot with OpenAI’s GPT-4 artificial intelligence model that resembles the startup’s viral ChatGPT bot.

Google It continues to be a leader in search advertising. Microsoft wants to become a more powerful competitor after introducing Bing in 2009, with the help of OpenAI. Microsoft said that for every percentage point of share it gains in the highly profitable search category, its revenue will increase by $2 billion.

With its debut in late November, ChatGPT sparked a wave of interest in generative AI technologies that generate text, images, and other content in response to human input. Microsoft provides ChatGPT cloud services and introduces GPT-4 to companies looking to build on generative AI.

In addition to augmenting Bing with GPT-4, Microsoft has announced plans to integrate an AI model into its Microsoft 365 productivity software and roll out a chatbot for security practitioners, among other products. For its part, Google is adding generative AI to its search engine, and it has a language model that rivals the GPT-4 that developers are starting to use.

“We’ve had a really good, positive signal since we launched,” Divya Kumar, global head of global marketing for search and AI at Microsoft, told CNBC in an interview. Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Bing has surpassed 100 million daily active users.

But while Bing took a share of consumer Web searches, it hasn’t won a share of search revenue in the nearly three months since Microsoft introduced the new version during a press event at its Redmond, Washington, campus, Bernstein analysts led by Mark Schmulek wrote in A note on Wednesday to clients.

“On its heights, Bing reached #4 in the US iOS app download rankings in early February,” Bernstein analysts wrote, citing Apptopia data. “After the launch of the new Bing, the total Bing app download volume increased by 4x. However, Bing download momentum decreased throughout March and April.” Bernstein has equivalent Buy ratings on Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft stock.

Now, Microsoft is augmenting Bing with more capabilities as well as expanding reach.

Microsoft is adding a way to go back to previous chat conversations, which ChatGPT has been offering for months. It will provide a way to export chats to Microsoft Word documents. It will also start displaying photos and other media in chat messages when applicable.

Over time, Bing will add integrations to third-party services such as OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha, allowing people to view and act on current information when talking with a chatbot. Open AI announce A similar concept called ChatGPT plug-ins in March, but those who want to try it out must first join a waiting list.

Kumar said the company will provide more details on how developers build the Bing chatbot at Microsoft’s Build developer conference, which begins May 23.

People still have to go through the Microsoft Edge web browser on computers or the Bing app on mobile devices in order to use the new Bing, including its chatbot. This means that Google has not yet allowed people to use the Bing chatbot from Google’s dominant Chrome browser. “We are still at the beginning of the journey and we are still learning,” Kumar said.

Edge has been increasing its share of the web browsing market quarterly for the past two years, Youssef Mahdi, head of consumer marketing, wrote in a blog post. Microsoft includes Edge in Windows 10 and Windows 11, and the default search engine in Edge is Bing.

Microsoft is updating Edge so that when people open a result that appears during a Bing chat, the chat will move to a sidebar in Edge in order to keep the conversation going, Mehdi wrote.

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