Microsoft Makes Bing Smarter Using Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft, the technology giant founded by Bill Gates, at an artificial intelligence focused event in San Francisco, revealed a number of new features coming to their search engine, Bing.

The company will be leveraging their AI research to upgrade the search engine and build a new partnership with Reddit. With the AI upgrade, Bing will be able to provide more thorough answers and allow for more conversational or general search queries. Bing users will also be able to search for specific Reddit communities, pages, AMAs and other threads more easily.

Microsoft further added Bing will make better use of object recognition, machine learning and other techniques using Artificial Intelligence. Bing search results will now show multiple perspectives to make the provided information easier to understand. Speaking about the latest features, Microsoft senior researcher Jake Hofman said, “We want to reduce the number of times that people read a number and can’t make sense of it. And we want to do that by providing some context, or an analogy, or perspective, that puts it in more familiar terms usually related to their everyday experience.“

Further, Bings comparison answers will also be expanded from just product comparisons.For example, Bing will provide a carousel of answers when there’s more than one way to answer a query. Another new feature is the new conversational search function powered by AI. Through this feature, Bing will be able to deploy a more advanced form of autocomplete to help users better phrase a query to get a more desirable answers on the first search. Bing will also get a new powerful image search function which will be able to recognize objects and identify objects in photos, including products.

The new features including Intelligent Search, Intelligent Image Search and Conversational Search will be rolled out today. Along with Bing, Microsoft Office 365 products, OneDrive and SharePoint will get the intelligent search upgrade to let users search for text within image and presentation slides.