Microsoft's new AI-powered Bing has been the talk of the town for the past few days. Since its limited preview launch, the integrated chatbot has seen demand in "multiple millions", also enabling the Bing app to surge to new heights in App Store charts. There's apparently also a very lengthy waitlist for more people who want to try out the new experience. There have been some some bumps in the road too, with the chatbot giving some truly unhinged responses while interacting with some users. Now, Microsoft has shared its learnings from the first week of limited launch.
Microsoft says that its new chatbot is being used by people across 169 countries as of now. The company has noted that there has been decent engagement from users so far, with people going beyond traditional search queries during their interactions. 71% of users have responded with upvotes to the AI-powered answers generated by the new Bing.
The Redmond tech firm says that it has also received some feedback about areas that it can improve in, while maintaining safety and trust.
To that end, while Microsoft has seen positive engagement on the citation capabilities where users can fact-check Bing's responses, the company says that it has had problems while presenting more real-time and factual data, such as the score of an ongoing match or figures from a financial report. To cater to this use-case, Microsoft will be increasing the "grounding data" in its AI model by a factor of four. Additionally, a toggle will also be offered to give users more control over the precision-creativity tradeoff for Bing's responses.
The other tricky area is chat. Microsoft has noticed that people are using the chatbot for discovery and social entertainment and some lengthy conversations (15 or more questions) have resulted in the chatbot giving answers that are "not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone". To tackle this problem, Microsoft will be offering a control to reset a chat's context. It is also working on another control to give you more fine-grained access over the bot's tone.
When it comes to other fixes like broken links and formatting, Microsoft says that fixes are being rolled out daily and that bigger patches will be coming each week.
Lastly, for feature requests such as making the new Bing chatbot send an email or book a flight, and sharing answers, Microsoft hasn't committed to anything but has requested people to keep sending ideas. They may end up becoming a feature in future releases.
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