The race to introduce artificial intelligence-based features into search engines is gaining momentum, and Microsoft has launched a new tool for its Bing search engine. This week, the software giant rolled out a feature that responds to a user query in Bing with an AI-generated summary. The feature is currently in preview for a limited number of users.
Image source: Rubaitul Azad / unsplash.com
Along with the announcement of the new feature, Microsoft published several examples of how it works. The text of the response to the request generated by the neural network is supplemented with links to the sources on the basis of which the summary was generated. In addition to this, there is a section with related information. For example, a summary in response to the query “how long do elephants live” is supplemented with videos that talk about factors affecting the life expectancy of elephants. After the section with information generated by the neural network, the usual search results for the user’s request are located.
Unfortunately, Bing’s AI search feature currently only handles a “small percentage of user queries” and is not available to everyone. “We’re rolling out this feature gradually and are taking our time to gather feedback, test, learn, and work to create a quality product before making the feature available to a wider audience,” Microsoft said in a statement. Microsoft likely doesn’t want to rush into mass adoption of the new feature to avoid the problems faced by Google, which earlier this year added a similar AI tool to its search engine that often generated less-than-correct responses to user queries.