Microsoft’s Bing is gaining a number of AI improvements, including support for OpenAI’s new DALLE-E 3 model, more personalized answers in search and chat, and tools that will watermark images as being AI-generated. The company announced these and other Windows and Bing news at an event this week in New York, where it also introduced new Surface devices that include built-in AI experiences.
The company said its Windows 11 upgrade will bring a number of AI improvements, including the addition of its AI helper Copilot starting on September 26, which will then expand across Bing, Edge and Microsoft 365 Copilot this fall. The latter will be available for enterprise customers on November 1, 2023, along with Microsoft 365 Chat, a new AI assistant for the workplace. AI experiences are also coming to Windows apps like Paint, Photos, Clipchamp and more.
But beyond the Windows features, Microsoft also introduced a number of AI improvements to its search engine Bing, including, notably, the addition of OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model. The company first brought the image creator DALL-E to Bing in March of this year, allowing consumers to generate images in Bing Chat. At the time, the company didn’t say which version of DALL-E it was using beyond noting it was the “very latest” model.
Now, however, Microsoft confirms it will be upgrading the integration to DALL-E 3, which promises better renderings for details like fingers, eyes and shadows.
It’s also furthering its promises around responsible image generation. Previously, the system had guardrails to limit the generation of harmful or unsafe images. With the new release, it will also add invisible digital watermarks to all AI-generated images — something it calls Content Credentials. This technology uses cryptographic methods and standards set by the “Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)” to add more transparency around AI images. Adobe, Intel, Sony and others have also joined the C2PA.
Bing will also now offer more personalized answers to your search queries by leveraging your prior chats with Bing Chat.
Explains Microsoft, “if you’ve used Bing Chat to learn more about your favorite movies, books, or music, future conversations and searches will take those interests into account when providing answers.” The company notes that this system is opt-out, so users will be able to turn it off if they’d rather their chat history not inform their results.
For example, the company notes that if you’ve used Bing in the past to search for a favorite sports team, the next time you’re planning a trip Bing could tell you if your team is playing in your destination city.
Microsoft says the feature would improve search results, as many people end up doing dozens of searches on a single topic — and that, in fact, more than 60% of those searches are spent tweaking the original query. But those searches aren’t as useful as they could be because they don’t include personalized context, like what you’ve searched for previously or what you’re researching across the web now.
The company additionally said it’s bringing support for multimodal Visual Search and Image Creator to Bing Chat Enterprise to its more than 160 million Microsoft 365 users who currently have access to the workplace AI chatbot.
