About a month ago, Mikhail Parakhin, who was at the time the head of Microsoft"s Advertising and Web Services, revealed that a small number of Bing Chat chatbot users were able to access a new "No Search" feature.
The feature allowed those testers to disable Bing Chat"s connection to search the web for answers to questions. This offers some benefits for certain tasks, such as the ability for the chatbot to solve complex math problems, do some coding for users, or even for people to just have casual conversations with Bing Chat.
Since this post was made, there"s been no word on whether the "No Search" feature will be expanded to more Bing Chat users. When someone asked Parakhin who is now the head of Windows and Web Devices, about the status of this feature on X (formerly Twitter), Parakhin revealed that the feature will now become "a plugin, UX-wise, and it is waiting for the general plugin rollout."
Nah, we made it a plugin, UX-wise, and it is waiting for the general plugin rollout
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) September 25, 2023
There"s no word yet on when the promised general plugin support for Bing Chat will launch. It was first announced in May as part of Microsoft"s Build 2023 developers conference. Windows enthusiast Leopeva64 posted on X this weekend that Adobe Express, MathSolver, and Spotify plugins were in his Bing Chat pane, but keep in mind that this appears again to be for a very limited percentage of Bing Chat users.
Speaking of updates, Parakhin announced earlier today on X that there"s been a "pretty big update in our Precise mode of Bing Chat". There have been no new features added, according to Parakhin, but users can now expect "better answers" when using the Precise mode. Hopefully, we will get even more updates on Bing Chat this week with the launch of the major Windows 11 update on Tuesday.