A few weeks ago, we reported that Microsoft was testing a new feature in Bing Chat with a small percentage of its user base. The new feature added image recognition to the chatbot, allowing users to get info on the image when sent in a text prompt.
Today, as part of Microsoft Inspire 2023, the company announced that the feature, now called Visual Search, is available for all Bing Chat users. In a blog post, Microsoft stated:
Leveraging OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, Visual Search in Chat lets anyone upload images and search the web for related content. Take a picture, or use one you find elsewhere, and prompt Bing to tell you about it — Bing can understand the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it. Whether you’re traveling to a new city on vacation and asking about the architecture of a particular building or at home trying to come up with lunch ideas based on the contents of your fridge, upload the image into Bing Chat and use it to harness the web’s knowledge to get you answers.
Visual Search will roll out today to Bing Chat desktop users, along with people who access the Bing mobile apps. It will also be added at a later date for the just announced and launched Bing Chat Enterprise chatbot.
You can see an example of how this will work in the video above. A person creates a doodle of a website form, and uploads it to Bing Chat. It then asks to create HTML code based on the doodle. Bing Chat performs this task, within a few seconds, and the user can now copy and paste the code to his HTML website editor and see the forms working as intended.
The Microsoft Bing Chat team has also been busy testing out some other features with a small public group over the past several weeks. That includes adding support for using Bing Chat in browsers other than Microsoft Edge, such as Google's Chrome or Apple's Safari.
Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, recently mentioned on Twitter that the Bing Chat team is "running flights" on getting the chatbot to remember previous conversations.
He also mentioned in an answer to a person's Twitter inquiry that several other features are being worked on "in some form", including a way to pin chat conversations, a way to hear chat responses without voice chat, and more.
