We’ve heard multiple rumors that the innovative AI tool ChatGPT will be integrated into the Microsoft Bing search engine in the near future, and now we’ve got a leaked preview of how the integration will actually work and appear in your browser.
students and designers Yin Owen (opens in a new tab) (pass edge (opens in a new tab)) somehow gained access to the upcoming upgrade and was able to test it for a while before being shut down. If you’ve used ChatGPT before, the interface will be familiar: on-screen prompts will ask you for information or help you with whatever you like.
Obviously, you have 1,000 characters to work with. One example shown in Yin’s screenshot is searching for art and craft ideas for toddlers using specific materials — a type of query that ChatGPT excels at, and you won’t necessarily get very useful results from Google.
Bing with ChatGPT added also tells you where it came from: you’ll see a list of sources below the reply, kind of like you do on Wikipedia. This means you can check, at least to some extent, whether what ChatGPT is saying is accurate.
Bing’s ChatGPT integration just popped up for me. Replace the search bar with composer for natural language problems pic.twitter.com/NxZ0k9O92CFebruary 3, 2023
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According to this leak, traditional search results won’t disappear entirely. They’ll be available on a separate screen, and you can use the toolbar at the top to switch between the old-fashioned list of blue links and future searches.
It does feel like the standard way of searching does feel a little dated right now — which is no doubt part of the reason Google will be rolling out its own version of the technology in the coming days. If you’ve run a traditional web search lately, you know that the results returned aren’t always very useful.
A more conversational approach, such as that offered by ChatGPT, offers more precision and customization. For example, you can use an AI engine to write a wedding speech or plan a road trip on your own, using natural language to refine the results instead of just scouring the web for speech or travel itinerary ideas.
Microsoft is also reportedly keen on adding ChatGPT functionality to its Office suite to help you draft letters, create PowerPoint slides, and compose emails. In the near future, we will all rely on artificial intelligence even more.
