Microsoft decided not to post a Bing Chat development update on its official Bing blog this week. That"s most likely because of the US Independence Day holiday. However, that doesn"t mean there wasn"t any work done on the company"s AI chatbot.
Jordi Ribas, the Head of Engineering and Product for Bing, posted on Twitter today that Bing Image Creator got some backend improvements this week, that should cut down "image creation time by 30%."
Tried Bing Image Creator lately? You may have noticed it"s faster – that"s because we"ve reduced image creation time by 30%. We often celebrate shipping new features, but I’m just as excited about shipping gains on fundamentals like performance. Try it and see what you think! pic.twitter.com/OI3fB63Sdb
— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) July 7, 2023
Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, was also busy as usual answering Bing Chat questions this week. One person asked when the promised third-party plug-in support would launch. Parakhin replied, "Still a few weeks away. Working through the long tail of invocation issues, but very confident."
Another person asked when the Image recognition feature, which was tested by a small number of Bing Chat users a few weeks ago, would officially go live for everyone. Parakhin stated, "We were planning to do it this week, but a bunch of unrelated JavaScript bugs were discovered in the package, so will have to delay a bit. Hopefully, next week."
Finally, a Bing Chat user asked Parakhin if Microsoft was working on a way just to chat with the AI chatbot, "without it searching the web for every minor question it already knows." Parakhin replied in the affirmative, stating, "Yes, official #nosearch support is coming soon." That will certainly be a welcome new addition and could lead to some very different and interesting Bing Chat interactions.