In early February, Microsoft announced that it had combined its Bing search engine with the ChatGPT AI chatbot from OpenAI to give users more human conversational answers to their questions. It’s a welcome change from the usual list of links on a web page that may or may not provide the information you need.
However, access to this new feature is limited to people who use the Microsoft Edge web browser on Windows, macOS, or Linux. The waitlist to sign up for this experience hasn’t ended yet, but the company has made it much easier for anyone who wants to try it out to do so.
All you have to do now is head over to the Bing homepage in Edge, click the chat option, and start asking it questions. It’ll give you the results you need, plus footnoted references to where it got them from so you can learn more if you want. It can even write content for you, generating things like email responses, social media posts, or an itinerary for a trip you’re planning. It can also do math, find the best price on a flight ticket, or translate your words into dozens of other languages.
The only catch is that unless you’re already signed in to a Microsoft account, you can only ask five questions per session. That’s the bare minimum, but it’s still a lot better than nothing at all. This version of ChatGPT is also “content-aware,” meaning it will remember your queries and respond to similar ones without having to start from scratch. You can even set it to be creative and get some fun responses or to be more precise in its response.
But while there’s no doubt that ChatGPT is a big improvement over the average search engine, it’s still far from perfect. As a recent post on Stack Overflow points out, there are issues with the quality of its answers. It’s often inaccurate and doesn’t always provide a proper source for its facts. It can also be quite repetitive, sometimes repeating the same answer in different ways.
Microsoft is working to address these problems with an update to its ChatGPT integration. It’s still limiting access to the experience to users who use the Edge web browser, but it has removed the requirement that you have to be signed in to a Microsoft account. In addition, it will make the Bing chatbot available in the Bing app and the mobile web browser version of the Edge browser.
This update will be rolling out to all customers over the next week. If you’re a current Edge user and want to try the ChatGPT-powered search, follow our guide for getting started. We’ll be updating this article as soon as we have more details about the rollout. If you have questions, let us know in the comments below. We’ll do our best to help you out. Thanks for reading! — ZDNet. ZDNet is a leading technology news website that covers the latest gadgets, software, and tech.
