After taking a week off, Microsoft has issued a new and official Bing Chat development update on its Bing blog site. The update highlights some improvements in certain categories, along with a new Skype feature.
The blog post states that Bing Chat should now be a bit more helpful for users looking for answers relating to sports:
In this update, we’ve supported a much broader range of team sports. Ask Bing Chat to “Show the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 schedule” or “When is the next Angels vs. White Sox game?”
In addition, Microsoft has added a way to use the AI art generator Bing Image Creator inside its Skype chat app:
Once Bing is added to your Skype conversation, ask it to “generate an image of a koala bear meditating in a forest in the style of Pablo Picasso.”
This new feature should definitely make Skype chats with your friends more interesting.
The blog post mentions that there have been some backend improvements this week as well. It should reduce latency spikes with certain answers. This improvement was described more clearly by Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services in a Twitter post he wrote earlier this week.
Fun fact: internally, we are most excited about something majority of people find boring. Yesterday we released a completely reworked backend for inner monologue, reducing time to first token by ~25%, and, far more importantly, making latency more stable, reducing spikes: pic.twitter.com/E0zBZ3lHyY
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) June 29, 2023
The blog post also mentioned the previously announced new AI-generated Microsoft Shopping features that started rolling out to Bing Search, Bing Chat, and the Microsoft Edge web browser. It also mentioned the first public access to the AI assistant Windows Copilot feature that was included in this week"s Dev Channel update for Windows 11 Insiders.