Microsoft enhances Copilot and Bing with new generative AI features

Microsoft Corp. today introduced a set of new artificial intelligence features for its Copilot chatbot and Bing search engine.

Most of the capabilities are rolling out to Copilot. The Bing enhancements, in turn, will enable the service to deliver more detailed answers to user queries. Both updates began rolling out to users this morning.

One of the main highlights of the new Copilot release is a feature called Copilot Vision that can analyze the images in a webpage and answer questions about them. According to Microsoft, online shopping is among the use cases to which the capability can be applied. A consumer could, for example, ask the chatbot to generate interior design tips based on furniture photos in an e-commerce catalog. 

Copilot Vision is disabled by default for users of Microsoft’s chatbot. Moreover, the feature can’t be used with web pages that contain paywalled or sensitive content. Microsoft has pledged to delete any data that Copilot Vision may collect about a web page to answer user questions. 

The feature is rolling out alongside another multimodal capability called Copilot Voice. That addition will enable Microsoft’s chatbot to understand spoken questions and read its responses out aloud.

The new multimodal features are joined by a capability called Copilot Daily. Every morning, the latter tool generates a summary of the news and displays a weather forecast. It can also remind the user about upcoming events.

The other enhancements to Copilot are mainly designed to help users more quickly find information. One feature, Copilot Discover, suggests search queries and can provide pointers on how to use Microsoft’s chatbot. Another new capability called Think Deeper allows Copilot to generate more thorough responses to user questions.

“Using the very latest reasoning models, it can help with anything from solving tough math problems to weighing up the costs of managing home projects,” the Microsoft development team behind Copilot detailed in a blog post. “Think Deeper can take more time before responding, allowing Copilot to deliver detailed, step-by-step answers to challenging questions.”

Bing AI updates

Bing, the other service for which Microsoft introduced new AI features today, is receiving a capability similar to Think Deeper. It’s accessible through a new “Deep search” button on the search results page. Selecting the option configures Bing to generate detailed natural language response to user questions.

Depending on the query, the answer that the search engine outputs can span multiple paragraphs. Each paragraph is organized in a separate interface panel that sometimes includes not only text but also other assets such as tables and explainer videos from YouTube. Below the content, Bing displays links to the webpages on which it based the answer.

“We’re continuing to roll this experience out slowly to ensure we deliver a quality experience before making this broadly available,” Microsoft detailed in a blog post. “We also continue to ensure there are additional citations and links that enable users to explore further and check accuracy, which in turn will send more traffic to publishers to maintain a healthy web ecosystem.”

Image: Microsoft