Last week, Microsoft launched the new AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser. The new AI-powered Bing delivers better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content. In the past 1 week, select set of people in over 169 countries have been testing the new Bing experience. Microsoft today published a blog post explaining their learnings so far.
The Bing Chat feature in particular has generated lots of interest since it is an industry-first product that combines the web search experience with the conversational AI technology. Some users were able to push Bing Chat to its limits. On certain occasions, Bing Chat got annoyed, emotional, angry and more. Microsoft confirmed that Bing team is aware of these extreme cases and actively working on improving the experience.
Here’s the summary of Microsoft’s learnings so far:
- The feedback on the answers generated by the new Bing has been mostly positive with 71% of you giving the AI-powered answers a “thumbs up.”
- Microsoft is seeing a good engagement on the new chat feature and also traditional search results.
- Microsoft is finding challenges with answers that need very timely data like live sports scores. Also, for queries which need more direct and factual answers such as numbers from financial reports, Microsoft is planning to 4x increase the grounding data it sends to the model.
- Microsoft may add a toggle that gives you more control on the precision vs creativity of the answer to tailor to your query.
- Microsoft is learning a new use-case for chat is how people are using it as a tool for more general discovery of the world, and for social entertainment.
- Microsoft is fixing the reported technical issues or bugs with the new Bing, such as slow loading, broken links, or incorrect formatting in daily releases and in its larger releases each week.
- In long, extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions, Bing can become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone. This is because of following reasons:
- Very long chat sessions can confuse the model on what questions it is answering. There should be a tool so you can more easily refresh the context or start from scratch.
- The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn’t intend. Microsoft is looking at how to give you more fine-tuned control.
The only way to improve a product like this, where the user experience is so much different than anything anyone has seen before, is to have people like you using the product and doing exactly what you all are doing.
Did you try the new Bing recently? Let us know your opinion on the new Bing in the comments section below.
