Microsoft Bing AI Copilot: Multimodal input, plug-ins and more in the works

Microsoft said it is opening up Bing to more people by making its AI Copilot available in open preview, which essentially means no more waitlist for trial

Microsoft on Thursday announced the next set of features coming to its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine (Bing) and browser (Edge). The American software giant said it is opening up Bing to more people by making its AI Copilot available in open preview, which essentially means no more waitlist for trial. Besides, the company announced multimodal support in chat and opening up the platform capabilities to developers by enabling plug-ins support. Below are the details:

From text-only to multimodal

Microsoft is testing multi-modal capabilities within Bing AI. It essentially means users will be able to upload images and search the web for related content. Besides, the company is set to introduce visual answers in chat in the form of charts, graphs, and text formatting. Recently, Microsoft integrated its Image Creator service into the new Bing chat that allowed users to generate both written and visual content in one place. Now, the company is expanding the Image Creator service to all languages in Bing – more than 100 languages. It essentially means you can text input in one of the supported languages in Bing Chat and it would come up with a synthetic images that best represent the text in visual form.

Chat history for continued conversations

Microsoft said chat history is one of the two most requested features by the users, share and export option is second. Soon, Microsoft would allow Bing Chat users to pick up conversation from where they left off and return to previous chats in Bing chat with chat history. Moreover, the company said it is exploring ways to make chats more personalised by bringing context from a previous chat into new conversations. As for the share and export, soon Microsoft would add the option to export and share.

Summarise my document

Expanding on the chat and compose feature of the Edge browser, Microsoft would soon add an improved summarisation capabilities for long documents, including PDFs and longer-form websites.

Moving from product to platform

Microsoft said it would soon build third-party plug-ins into the Bing chat experience, creating a platform for developers. The company said it is working with OpenAI to make it easier and as consistent as possible for developers to take advantage of this opportunity.