The new offerings combine browsing and chat into a unified experience that displays more relevant search results.
Microsoft may have ushered in a paradigm shift Tuesday with the release of new versions of its search engine, Bing, and web browser, Edge — both now powered by artificial intelligence.
The new offerings, available in preview at Bing.com, combine browsing and chat into a unified experience that improves both tasks. When searching, for example, more relevant results are displayed, and for information like sports scores, stock prices, and weather forecasts, results may appear without leaving a search page.
For more complex queries — such as “what can I substitute for eggs when baking a cake” — Bing can synthesize an answer from many online sources and present a summary response.
Searchers can also chat with Bing to further refine a search and use it to help create content, such as travel itineraries or a quiz for trivia night.
The Edge browser, in addition to getting a facelift, also has AI functions for chatting and creating content. You can ask it to summarize lengthy reports, reducing them to key takeaways, or create a LinkedIn post from a few prompts.
“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all — search,” Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said in a statement.
When you integrate AI with search, you can get the best of both worlds, observed Bob O’Donnell, founder and chief analyst at Technalysis Research, a technology market research and consulting firm in Foster City, Calif.
“You can have the timeliness of a search index and the intelligence of a natural language-based chat and summary tool,” O’Donnell told TechNewsWorld.
This video demonstrates the new Bing chat experience:
“What they’re doing is finally making computers smart,” he explained. “It enables them to deliver what’s meant, not what’s necessarily said. “
“It’s going to take people some time to get used to it, but it is dramatically better,” he said. “Its time-saving and efficiency is off the charts.”
“I think we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift,” he added.
Ross Rubin, the principal analyst with Reticle Research, a consumer technology advisory firm in New York City, pointed out that bringing AI to Bing is just the tip of a larger Microsoft strategy.
“It’s not just about Bing, which is low-hanging fruit for integration,” Rubin told TechNewsWorld.
