Microsoft has been making a number of announcements surrounding its Bing search and chat AI division over the past few weeks. Earlier this week, it revealed Bing Chat features that are being added to SwiftKey, Edge, and Skype. However, the head of the Bing division quietly revealed a small but still important feature that could help expand Bing Chat to more customers.
Late on Tuesday, Michael Schechter, the Vice President of Microsoft's Bing group, posted on Twitter that it has "started rolling out unauthenticated chat access on Bing". That means the previous requirement that people needed a Microsoft Account (MSA) to access Bing Chat is now no longer an issue.
As some of you have noticed, we’ve started rolling out unauthenticated chat access on Bing. Seeing only 5 chat turns per session? Sign in to have longer conversations.
— Michael Schechter (@mikeschechter) May 17, 2023
However, there is a caveat to that announcement. Schechter indicates in his post that non-Microsoft Account access to Bing Chat is limited to just five chat turns per session. If you want to get more, that's when you need to sign into a Microsoft Account. At the moment, those users can get up to 20 chat turns per session.
Microsoft officially announced earlier this month there is no more waitlist for anyone to check out Bing Chat, so this small but significant decision to allow even limited access to the chatbot without a Microsoft Account cannot help but expand its reach to even more people.
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