This year the AI chatbot space has been heating up at a rapid pace, and while undoubtedly ChatGPT has been the hottest topic in the AI space lately, Microsoft Bing has been quietly working away at its own version of a chatbot, “Bing Chat”, and has been slowly rolling it out for public use.
Microsoft Initially launched Bing Chat in preview mode with no restrictions on its usage so that it could gather feedback from the public, but authenticated use was eventually introduced and users needed a Microsoft account to access the chatbot.
Now, with new features introduced, Bing Chat can be used unauthenticated without a Microsoft account, but there are some hefty limits to its use.
What Do We Know About Bing Chat So Far?
One of the biggest differences between ChatGPT and Bing Chat is that Microsoft has geared its chatbot toward search, calling itself “Your AI-powered answer engine”.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, was released as the first actual ‘chatbot’, trained over time to provide information in similar ways to how a human would but the information it has access to is limited to the year 2021.
This is where Bing Chat has an advantage, it has access to the internet and can bring you up-to-date search results, making it entirely more useful than ChatGPT if you’re searching for up-to-date information on a topic.
Bing Chat will also provide sources for the information it finds for you and takes advantage of GPT-4, while ChatGPT charges for access to the advanced AI under their “Plus” subscription.
Microsoft officially launched Bing Chat in February, and since then, one million people spanning 169 countries have interacted with it.
Initially, Microsoft rolled Bing Chat out to users with a Microsoft account, but with new features being added over the last few months and the popularity of the tool rising they’ve now lifted this restriction and introduced unauthenticated access.
Unauthenticated Use Of Bing Chat
You can now use Bing Chat without a Microsoft account, but there are limits.
In a tweet this week, Bing VP said “Seeing only 5 chat turns per session? Sign in to have longer conversations.”
Non-logged-in users will face the significant restriction of 5 chats per session, while logged-in users will still see limitations to its use.
Logged-in users will be able to have up to 20 messages in a conversation and up to 100 turns in a day.
The limits are in place due to the chatbot getting confused and providing inaccurate information after users had long chats with it, reports windowscentral.com.
The chatbot would go off-topic and occasionally provide rude responses which drew a lot of criticism online.
Since then, Microsoft has been committed to improving the chatbot so that it can support longer chats without running into issues, but there’s likely a long way to go before the AI search engine perfects its interactions with humans.
Bing isn’t the only search engine to have introduced AI to its toolbox.
Google recently released its own AI-powered search engine – the race is certainly on to provide a streamlined experience in the world of AI-powered search.
News of Bing Chat is developing fast and we’ll have our finger on the pulse when it comes to providing you breaking news updates. Be sure to check back regularly for further breaking news and developments.
