Microsoft announced on Wednesday that the new Bing is now accessible through the Microsoft Edge browser for Android and iOS, as well as the Bing mobile app.
As a result, you can now interact with Bing’s chat feature through voice input.
There is also a new integration with Skype, Microsoft’s messaging program, which lets you use Bing to add more details to text conversations.
With the “@Bing” command, you can now add Bing to any chat and ask it the same questions you would in regular chat mode, thanks to this new integration, which is now in preview.
You can select whether you want your responses to show as bullet points, text, or in the form of a “simplified response,” as Microsoft refers to it, which is a neat feature. In fact, that’s a feature I’d want to see included in the standard Bing Chat as well.
For those who are on the go, the inclusion of voice search is a welcome addition.
You will be able to speak your queries into Bing, which will then read the response back to you using Microsoft’s text-to-speech technology, a Microsoft representative said.
So we’ll have to wait and hear how Bing sounds. However, there can be little doubt that these large language models present a compelling use case for voice assistants, which have long waited for a killer feature beyond setting timers. Microsoft gave up on its Cortana voice assistant in recent years (and Bing specifically notes that it is “not an assistant”).
It’s no secret that consumers have pushed the system well beyond what Microsoft had tested for, forcing the corporation to significantly reduce Bing’s original functionality.
These technologies are still in their infancy, and Microsoft has happily shown itself to be extremely receptive to its critics, even though it is now limiting users to just six turns per conversation and a total of 60 queries per day.