Following the announcement of Bing Image Creator, Microsoft has dropped another update to the ever-popular improved Bing and introduced ‘Knowledge Cards 2.0’. These knowledge cards will appear on the right side of the Bing search results page and help give users a deeper insight into topics they’re interested in, but in convenient bite-sized chunks.
These nuggets of knowledge include facts, timelines, and related topics all generated by AI. Of course, that last bit does make us a little wary, as Microsoft’s Bing AI does have a history of making stuff up. But we’re hopeful that Microsoft has done its due diligence and wouldn’t roll something like this out without making sure the bot has its facts straight.
The blog post from the official site also details that the knowledge panels are accompanied by Stories; Bing will now put out AI-generated stories that will add more context to your area of interest in the search engine, using text, images, and video. These will be accessible to all Bing users in English, French, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Arabic.
The steady stream of updates from Microsoft does show that the company is not only committed to evolving and improving its AI-powered product, but also that it can do so quickly. Whether you’re best friends with Google Bard or not, you do have to admit that we have yet to see them start dropping fun and funky updates in the same way Microsoft is. We noted earlier this month that Bing AI is slowly but steadily poaching users from Google, and this is likely one of the main reasons.
👀 we’re testing 20/200 this weekend to see how things go https://t.co/ptD2qhOYGuMarch 26, 2023
Alongside the Knowledge Cards, Microsoft has also increased Bing Chat’s session limit from 15 to 20 turns. The Vice President of Microsoft Bing’s Growth and Distribution team, Michael Schechter, confirmed in a tweet that the company did also test out bringing the daily chat limit up to 200.
MSpoweruser noted that while the increased chat limit may be a positive change, users are still asking the company to address the 2000-character limit on Bing’s AI chat.
While we may be able to work around the character limit if we’re allowed to maintain longer interactions, it’s a request we hope Microsoft gets around to addressing soon so we can see how Bing performs in long-form text.
Analysis: Worth stanning?
As a big fan of Google Bard, it is still rather easy to see why so many people are gravitating towards Bing instead. I enjoy the steady and consistent tone Bard has, and the user interface is comforting and easy to navigate, but we Google fans are simply not getting the kind of updates Bing fans are.
That can make it super tempting to move over to Microsoft’s side. Google has yet to put out major updates or introduce any significant new features to Bard and we can’t be sure how reliable such updates will be when they do arrive. Obviously, Microsoft is using OpenAI’s GPT-4 and so has access to other products developed by Open AI, like DALL-E.
Google developing its own bot from the ground up does explain the delays a little bit, but I’m not sure how long people will be willing to wait - particularly when it seems like every week Microsoft is announcing a new update, showing off new tests and potential new features.
I’m hopeful that Google will catch up once the company has its footing in this new, weird terrain of AI-powered consumer tech, but until then we can all get acquainted with Microsoft’s latest update and muse over whether we’re all going to be using Microsoft Edge so we can use Bing AI. What a shake-up that would be.
