It"s been a relatively slow week for public developments with Microsoft"s Bing Chat team. However, desktop users of the chatbot AI service can now access Bing Chat in a new way.
As revealed today on the official Bing blog, Microsoft has now added voice chat to people who use Bing chat on the desktop. The feature was already available for mobile users. Desktop users with a working microphone can start speaking into Bing chat by clicking the microphone icon. Microsoft states:
We currently support English, Japanese, French, German, and Mandarin, with more languages on the way. Try asking Bing Chat, “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Bing Chat also supports text to speech answers—it will respond to your questions in its own voice. Using voice input, ask Bing Chat, “What’s the toughest tongue twister you know?”
Officially, that"s the only new thing that was mentioned as being added this week to Bing Chat in the latest blog post. However, we did confirm several days ago that Microsoft has begun experimenting with adding Bing Chat support for third party PC browsers such as Google"s Chrome and Apple"s Safari. This support is only being rolled out to a few users at the moment. However, if you use the Vivaldi web browser, you can now access Bing Chat with the newly released 6.1 update.
Microsoft also started a new social network marketing campaign this week to help promote better use of Bing Chat to search for answers or to just create a funny story. Unfortunately, it was discovered that Microsoft was using Bing Chat in Edge to create a false AI answer when someone searched for the term "Chrome". Instead, it generated what was basically an ad to use Bing. Microsoft later said it had removed this "feature" from Bing Chat.