• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 18, 2023

At Microsoft Inspire, the company announced Visual Search in Chat for Bing -- a way to visually search.

Users can upload photos to Bing Chat and ask the AI search engine questions based on the images.

The company began testing the new feature in Bing Chat a few weeks ago with a small percentage of its users. Image recognition was added to the chatbot, allowing users to get info on the image when sent in a text prompt.

“Leveraging OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, Visual Search in Chat lets anyone upload images and search the web for related content,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post. Users can take a picture or use one they find somewhere else, and prompt Bing to tell them about it.

Bing can identify the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it -- whether someone is traveling to a new city on a vacation and asking about the architecture of a particular building or at home trying to come up with lunch ideas based on the contents of a refrigerator.

Visual Search in Chat is rolling out now on desktop and the Bing mobile app. Microsoft said it is working to bring this feature to Bing Chat Enterprise.

Microsoft also announced the expansion of Bing to reach new audiences with Bing Chat Enterprise, to support AI-powered chat for work. It rolled out in preview on Tuesday.