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Microsoft’s new ChatGPT powered Bing search engine is evolving fast – it’s now made the leap to Android and iOS smartphones with new mobile apps that also offer voice search.
The new apps, available today, bring Bing’s new AI chat capabilities to our phones for the first time. Assuming your account has access to the new search engine, you can summon the chat assistant by tapping the Bing icon at the bottom of your screen.
But the real game changer, and a harbinger for the future of AI search, is the addition of voice search to Bing’s mobile experience, which Microsoft says is one of the “most requested features” from the preview community.
This means you can physically talk to its ChatGPT-powered brain in a more casual way than the desktop version, by questioning it about trivia or possible dinner options (as in Microsoft’s preview image above).
Unhappy with those new features, Microsoft is also making the new Bing available on the home page of the Microsoft Edge mobile app — launching a global preview of what it calls “AI-powered Bing for Skype.”
This allows you to add Bing to your Skype group, like a standard Skype contact, and ask questions for the whole group to see. Microsoft says this could be especially useful for organizing trips, letting Bing talk about weather forecasts and what’s happening at travel destinations during your visit.
Microsoft says you can choose whether you want your answers to appear in bullet points, text, or a simpler answer. If you have a multilingual group chat, it can also translate the answers into more than 100 languages. Of course, Microsoft says it will “bring these skills to other communication apps, like Teams, in the future.”
Analysis: Microsoft’s “co-pilots” spread their wings
Microsoft’s new Bing and Edge mobile apps, alongside the new ChatGPT-powered Skype, show that the real power of AI chatbots is that they’re baked into existing apps — as well as voice assistants.
We’ve already seen the power and significant limitations of combining AI chat with search engines in the two weeks since Microsoft launched its new version of Bing on desktop.
As we’ve argued before, rushing ChatGPT-powered Bing to iPhones and Androids can be a bad idea, as the technology is still in its infancy and capable of forgetting things, getting a little aggressive, or just plain replying. invent.
Since, as Microsoft claims, 64% of searches take place on mobile phones, these new apps are likely to push the boundaries of AI-powered technology even further. Still, the recent introductions of guardrails to limit Bing chats to five replies per conversation could certainly help improve the experience – and this will presumably also be the case on its mobile apps.
Microsoft is also building quite a lead over Google in building these AI features into its software, with Skype and soon Teams taking advantage of their “co-pilot” assistance. This puts pressure on Google to add similar features to the likes of Google Sheets, which until now only took advantage of ChatGPT plugins.
We’re also looking forward to seeing how well ChatGPT works with voice search – if the experience is good, it bodes well for a future where Alexa and Siri (plugging into similar AI-powered tools) actually deliver on their early promise and well become.