Major new Bing AI features revealed during the Microsoft Surface event

Microsoft has more updates to share about its AI chatbot that's setting the bar for what can be done with search.

At the event on Thursday, the tech giant introduced improvements to Bing Chat, designed to fit into the everyday ways you browse the web. Soon, you'll be able to use new features, that include more personalized answers, a more helpful shopping experience, and Image Creator powered by OpenAI's new DALL-E 3.

It's hard to believe, but it's been almost a year since ChatGPT kicked off a generative AI hype cycle. Quickly on the heels of its launch, Microsoft rocked the search engine world with a partnership with OpenAI and the new Bing. Now, Microsoft has integrated generative AI with almost all of its apps and products, and Bing has continued to evolve as a much smarter version of Clippy for online search (whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you).

Building off the ability to save your chat history, Bing now provides more personalized answers that carry over from previous conversations. If you've previously asked Bing about something like your favorite sports team or pet advice, the AI chatbot takes your chat history into consideration when giving its responses. It's essentially like talking to a friend with a very good memory who knows your tastes and interests. If this level of familiarity freaks you out too much, you can also turn off this feature.

Bing also aims to be more helpful with online shopping, saving you from having to research what exactly you're looking for. Say, you're in the market for soccer cleats for your son (which is the example Divya Kumar, general manager of Search and AI Marketing used). Bing Chat will guide you through the specifics, asking about factors like experience level and age, and recommends products with pros and cons. It also gives you prices from different retailers, so you know you're getting the best deal. Soon, you'll also be able to take or upload a photo of a product you're looking for and find results that way.

Speaking of images and multimodality, Bing Chat now uses DALL-E 3 for its Image Creator tool. From a simple text prompt, you can generate high-quality images from the OpenAI technology, which, for the record, has gotten way better at rendering fingers and eyes. Microsoft's Designer tool also works directly within Bing you can edit AI-generated images within the chat.

As a way of differentiating from human-created images, a responsibility feature called Content Credentials will digitally add an invisible watermark to AI-generated images. Content Credentials also works in Microsoft Paint and Designer.

Last July, Microsoft introduced a business-friendly version of Bing Chat so you can use it for work without fear of feeding confidential information to the model. Bing Chat Enterprise has built-in privacy features and doesn't save your chat history or use your data to train the model. Now, this feature has expanded to the Microsoft Edge mobile app and is capable of multimodal prompts via Image Creator.