It"s been a pretty busy week for the new Bing Chat service from Microsoft. More and more people are being invited to test the chatbot, and Microsoft rolled out a new version (v96, in fact) with some improvements and additional features. Today, the company updated its Bing blog with more info on what"s been added to Bing Chat.
Perhaps the most notable new feature this week is one we have reported on before: The Bing Chat Tone selector. It allows users to switch how Bing Chat responds to questions. The choices are Balanced (even-handed answers to questions), Precise (shorter and more straight fact answers) and Creative (longer answers that might be more descriptive). Even the color of the background to the Bing Chat Tone selector changes from purple (Creative) to blue (Balanced) and to green (Precise),
Another new addition is chat turn counters. At the moment there are hard limits on how many chat turns a person can have in one day (100) and even in one chat session (six). Microsoft says:
It"s our intention to increase these limits—but in the meantime, we realize it may be difficult to anticipate when you"ll need to reset to a new topic. You"ll now see a turn counter and stoplights appear at the bottom of each Bing response to signal where you are in the conversation.
There are also some previously unannounced improvements:
- Page Context in Edge: If you used the Bing chat experience built into the Edge Dev channel for Windows, Bing was sometimes unable to recognize the context of the page you were browsing. We"ve fixed this problem for most scenarios.
- Chat Behavior: We"ve improved some chat behaviors that previously would have unnecessarily constrained responses or made them appear defensive or adversarial. Bing responses should be more engaging and provide more elaborate observations.
As we have reported before, Bing Chat can even add some ASCII art with certain questions.