• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 4, 2023

Microsoft officially moved to the next generation of search powered by artificial intelligence (AI), combining text, video, images and chat, as well as the ability to share content on social media.

Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and CMO at Microsoft, believes the move, announced Thursday, aims to solve the problem of nearly half of all web searches going unanswered, which results in billions of people’s searches falling short.

Search now combines Microsoft’s search index with large language models (LLMs) such as Open AI GPT-4, for better results.

Customers have engaged in more than 500 billion chats in the past 90 days, and this is fundamentally changing the way people find information, he wrote.

Using Bing chat allows people to pose questions like “what’s the best place to travel in June for someone with pollen allergies” or “what locations had the most volcanic activity worldwide during the past 10 years.”

Microsoft has made Bing more accessible with the introduction of the Windows taskbar, which reaches more than half a billion customers daily.

Overall, Bing has grown to exceed 100 million daily active users. Daily installs of the Bing mobile app have increased 4-times since launch.

Growth of daily users, in theory, attracts more advertisers as brands and companies search to connect with existing and new customers.

“It follows eight straight quarters of growth in our Microsoft Edge browser share,” Mehdi wrote.

Microsoft, which has branded this next version of Bing Search as “Your Copilot,” has opened the engine to more people and has added image and video to text with the goal of making it multimodel.

“We know from research that the human brain processes visual information about 60,000 times faster than text, making visual tools a critical way people search, create and gain understanding,” he wrote.

The company introduced more visual answers using charts, graphs and updated formats of answers.

The move takes Bing from single-use chat and search sessions to multi-session experiences with chat history and persistent chats in Edge.

Users have created more than 200 million images with Bing Image Creator.

This generations also opens the platform capabilities, so developers and third parties like Aisera, a software of a service provider, can build on top of Bing, Azure and other Microsoft products to help people take actions on queries and complete tasks. The move will expand Microsoft's developer network and provide extensive reach into different industries. 

“We know from research that the human brain processes visual information about 60,000 times faster than text, making visual tools a critical way people search, create and gain understanding,” he wrote.

Image Creator has been expanded to more than 100 languages in Bing. The plan also, which has begun, is to redesign the Edge browser, where one in four Bing chats originate.

Microsoft plans to add export and share functions into chat to easily share conversation with others in social media or continue iterating on ideas.

Chat in Microsoft Edge will have improved summarization capabilities for long documents, including PDFs and longer-form websites, making it easier to consume dense online content.

Edge actions., available in the coming weeks, give people the ability to use AI to complete more tasks with fewer steps. Edge mobile will have page context to ask questions in Bing chat related to the mobile page viewing. The compose feature in sidebar can now tailor drafts based on feedback like tone, length, phrasing and more.