Microsoft Bing crosses 100 million daily active users after Bing Chat was launched
Microsoft Bing has crossed 100 million daily active users for the first time. The company credits Bing Chat for boosting the growth of its search engine, and helping it reach the milestone.
AI Chat experience helps Bing user base grow by one-third
It is now exactly a month since the Redmond company announced the new Bing experience with Answers and Chat. The AI-assisted feature, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 (Prometheus natural language model), has drawn millions of users to try the service. That’s quite an impressive feat considering that the Chat is not publicly accessible for all users, it is locked behind a waitlist.
Users could gain faster access to the chatbot by installing the Bing Search app on their phone, and by using Edge as the default browser on their PC. This move contributed to the Bing Search app rising to the top charts of the iOS App Store. And since Microsoft had made its new Bing experience exclusive to Edge browser on desktop, it too benefited from the AI-craze, which naturally attracted scores of people to use the program.
ChatGPT has also played a crucial role in this. OpenAI’s chatbot has an outdated database, its knowledge is limited to events up to 2021. Bing AI’s chat on the other hand makes use of data from real-time events, giving it a significant advantage, not just in conversational capabilities, but also for providing results for search queries, answers, and creation. Microsoft says that 15 percent of Chat sessions on Bing are used for generating new content. The service sees about 3 chats per session, and has passed over 45 million chats since the preview was announced. The chat experience was also included in the company’s popular VOIP service, Skype.
The AI-powered search engine provides much better results than before, and Microsoft attributes the new Bing chat as the reason for its active user base growing by one third. The mobile app experience has also helped drive the numbers, it managed to increase the active user count by 6x than before. The company is expecting Microsoft Edge’s sidebar with Bing search and create to bolster further growth.
Bing AI Chat turn limit increased again
The experience is constantly being improved based on user feedback. When Bing Chat debuted, it had many limitations, notably a 5-turn limit for chats, and 50 per day. This was then increased to support 6 chats per thread, and 60 chats a day. Yesterday, Yusuf Mehdi, the Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, confirmed that the company was increasing the count again. Bing Chat now supports 10 chats per session, and 120 total per day, for a more interactive conversation.
Is AI the future of search?
Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo has launched its own AI-assisted, privacy-friendly search experience called DuckAssist, which summarizes answers by extracting data from Wikipedia. Another highly anticipated AI language model is Google Bard, it was launched on the same day as Bing Chat, but is yet to be available publicly. Jack Krawczyk, the product lead for Bard, recently told CNBC that Google’s AI is not about Search. Rather, Bard is a collaborative AI service that helps users generate content creatively. But since users will try to use it for search, Bard will have a look-up feature called Search It, though it is meant to provide search-like results.
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