As the AI race continues to gather pace, Microsoft has announced a number of new AI features, especially for Bing, as part of efforts to capture more of the billions of dollars in global search advertising market, projected to reach $279 billion in 2023
The company announced at its annual Build Conference on May 24, 2023 a host of updates for users. These include making Bing search results accessible to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot. ChatGPT’s answers were originally limited to information as of 2021.
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According to the tech giant, ChatGPT will now be able to pull information from Bing web results for ChatGPT Plus users and the feature will also be made available to the free users soon.
The new integration with Bing search results means ChatGPT will now provide more comprehensive and informative answers to questions.
Next generation business applications
Just like OpenAI, who have recently unveiled an ecosystem of plugins for their AI chatbot ChatGPT, Microsoft plans to follow suit by launching their own ecosystem of plugins for Bing.
According to John Roach, Microsoft introduced the concept of copilot some two years ago with the introduction of GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that assists developers with writing code.
Earlier this year they released a series of copilot AI systems along with the Bing chatbot.
Microsoft announced that it has expanded this ecosystem of Microsoft Copilots to include Copilot in Power BI and Copilot in Power Pages in preview, Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, which will be made available for preview in June, and Windows Copilot.
The company said plugins are the connection between copilots and the rest of the digital world.
“You may look at Bing Chat and think this is some super magical complicated thing, but Microsoft is giving developers everything they need to get started to go build a copilot of their own,” said Microsoft’s chief technology officer Kevin Scott.
“I think over the coming years this will become an expectation for how all software works.”
Microsoft is investing heavily in AI research and development making it easier for developers to build AI-powered applications. These new features will help businesses and developers take advantage of the power of AI to improve their products and services.
More about the new AI features
The software giant unveiled Microsoft Fabric, a new, all-encompassing analytics platform that connects OneLake, a single data repository, to data engineering, data integration, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, applied observability, and business intelligence.
Microsoft has also announced the general availability of the Microsoft Dev Box in July 2023, along with additional service features, such as new beginning developer images in the Azure marketplace and a specialized developer interface to manage dev boxes and environments in Azure Deployment Environments.
In the upcoming months, Windows Copilot will be made accessible in preview, according to Microsoft. In order to offer individualized responses and assist users in taking actions within Windows 11, such as altering a setting, playing a certain playlist, or opening a pertinent app, Windows Copilot builds on Bing Chat.
To make it simple to incorporate external data sources into Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft has also introduced Azure AI Studio. These upgrades speed up the time to value for apps powered by AI by allowing clients to deploy the most advanced AI models using their own data.
In addition to the new features for ChatGPT and Azure, Microsoft is also working on a new AI platform called Project Bonsai, which will make it easier for businesses to build and deploy AI models.
These are just a few of the new AI features that Microsoft announced at Build Conference 2023. The new features are expected to help businesses and developers take advantage of the power of AI to improve their products and services.
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