Competing with Google Search, Microsoft Introduces AI-Based Search Engine
Here's how to use Bing ChatGPT()
Microsoft recently launched a more sophisticated generative Bing search engine with the support of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Bing generative AI is similar to Google Search which also uses generative AI.
After going through the trial phase last July, Bing generative began rolling out to users in the United States on Wednesday, October 2. Even though it has been launched, Microsoft is still developing this feature. To use it, users can search for “Bing generative search” in Bing, and Microsoft also provides an option to make it easier for users to enable this feature for informational queries.
The search engine uses a combination of AI models that collect information from across the web and present summaries as search results. For example, when a user searches for "What is a spaghetti western?", Bing generative will provide a summary of the history and examples of the genre, complete with links to its sources.
Like Google's AI Overview feature, Bing also offers the option to view manual search results in addition to the AI-generated summary. Microsoft explains that the engine can understand search queries, review millions of sources, dynamically match content, and display results that match user intent in a new AI-generated layout.
However, concerns have been raised regarding the feature's impact on news publishers' traffic. Summary AI has the potential to reduce traffic to information source sites, which is already happening with Google, with one study showing a reduction of up to 25 percent in publisher traffic. Microsoft has promised to monitor the impact closely, although early data suggests that generative Bing may still be able to maintain the number of clicks to websites.
Even though Bing continues to grow, Google's dominance in the global search engine market remains enormous. According to Statista data, in September 2024, Google controls 81.95 percent of the market share, while Bing only has 10.51 percent.
Summarize Information
Microsoft introduced the latest artificial intelligence (AI) feature in Bing which allows the search engine to display a summary of the information users are looking for. In a demonstration shown on its official blog, the AI feature in Bing can provide summary information from user questions, such as "how long does an elephant live?" along with links to information sources.
In addition to summary information, the AI feature also displays video links that provide additional information, such as factors that influence an elephant's lifespan. However, currently this feature is only available to a small number of users.
"We're rolling out this feature in stages and will gather feedback, test, and strive to create a great experience before rolling it out more broadly," Microsoft said in a statement.
Microsoft guarantees that this generative AI feature will not harm the web publishing ecosystem. "Generative search experiences are designed to preserve traditional search results and increase the number of clickable links, such as references in search results," Microsoft wrote.
According to an Engadget report, Google previously launched a similar feature earlier this year called AI Overview, in an effort to retain users who had begun turning to AI chatbots for information.
AI Designer Features
Microsoft introduced Designer, a graphic design platform based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Now the Designer tool is available as a mobile application website for iOS and Android devices. Amazingly, Designer supports 80 languages in the world.
Through Designer, users can create graphic design images with the help of AI. The platform also helps beautify existing designs. Similar to Canva, this platform made by Microsoft provides visual design templates for various purposes such as greeting cards, cellphone wallpapers, or profile avatars.
Experienced designers can use this platform to create visual creations from scratch. Apart from being a standalone platform, Microsoft will also integrate Designer with other services from the company. With the Copilot AI service, users can link their visual work to projects in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. To fully access this integration feature, users need to subscribe to Copilot Pro.
First announced in 2022, Microsoft uses OpenAI's image-generating AI technology, namely DALL-E, to support Designer. In addition, Copilot has been integrated with DALL-E 3 and ChatGPT 4 Turbo, so Designer is also connected to these artificial intelligence services.
Help Accountant
Microsoft introduced the SpreadsheetLLM prototype, an artificial intelligence (AI) model that makes it easier to use spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, which are often used by accountants and data analysts. SpreadsheetLLM, revealed in a paper on the arXiv website entitled "SpreadsheetLLM: Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models", combines the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with the complex data structures of spreadsheets.
"SpreadsheetLLM is an approach to encoding spreadsheet content into a format that can be done with LLM, and allows this model to analyze spreadsheet content," Microsoft researchers wrote in a document as quoted by Venture Beat.
Microsoft researchers say AI tools like this need to be improved because spreadsheets are widely used in a variety of business tasks, from data entry to complex financial modeling. SpreadsheetLLM aims to overcome the difficulty of current language models in understanding structured, formula-filled spreadsheet content by using a new coding scheme that preserves the structure and relationships between worksheets.
SpreadsheetLLM has a wide range of potential applications, including automated data analysis, providing data-driven recommendations, answering data-related questions, and even creating new spreadsheets. The main goal is to make data in spreadsheets easier to create and understand, so that users can create queries with natural language rather than using complicated Excel formulas. This is expected to expand access to data understanding and empower more people in organizations to make data-based decisions.
Apart from that, SpreadsheetLLM can also automate routine tasks in Excel, such as deleting unnecessary data, formatting data, and performing aggregations, thus making data processing more efficient. Until now, Microsoft has not announced when SpreadsheetLLM will be integrated into data processing software such as Microsoft Excel.
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