As Microsoft continues pushing the new AI-powered Bing to more and more people for testing, it’s also starting to control how the bot responds. In a new update, the company released three options for the chatbot’s responses — creative, balanced and precise. The creative mode lets Bing give responses that are “original and imaginative” while the precise mode focuses more and factual accuracy and more concise answers.
The balanced mode is the default setting which as the name suggests, aims to strike a balance between letting the chatbot be creative while also sticking to facts. The new modes are rolling out to users who have already been invited to try the new Bing and a majority of users should see them show up in the Bing chat interface already.
Bing’s chatbot got off to a somewhat rocky start with increasingly unhinged responses to user prompts leading Microsoft to take some drastic actions to tame the bot. The company added strict restrictions to the point where the bot now simply refuses to answer any prompts that may generate a controversial answer and even limited the number of responses Bing gives in each conversation. However, these restrictions are now slowly being lifted.
The chatbot also received an update last week (Bing Chat v96) that aims to solve issues where it seemed unresponsive, including a “significant reduction in cases where Bing refuses to reply for no apparent reason”. However, this update should also fix the wild and in some cases even scary responses that Bing was shooting off left and right previously.
The latest Windows 11 update also added a shortcut to the Bing Chat in the Windows Taskbar as well. Microsoft was a little misleading here stating that it implemented a “typable Windows search box and the amazing capability of the new AI-powered Bing directly into the taskbar”. In reality, this is merely a shortcut that requires users to click the Bing Chat icon, which then opens up in a browser.
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