AdminMicrosoft just told us how the popular chatbot Bing has become more helpful in certain areas, and there have been recent improvements to the way the AI handles travel and recipe queries.
IN blog post (opens in a new tab) summarizing the improvements made over the past week, Microsoft noted that steps have been taken to give the ChatGPT-based AI better answers to these two topics.
In both cases, the software giant further notes that it has “improved the accuracy of the citations” and that for the recipes, improved “grounding data” from the providers of the legislation’s content was used, with the citations pointing to the provider’s website rather than Bing.com (avoiding the poaching traffic).
Expect more improvements in these areas based on user feedback, Microsoft tells us.
Elsewhere, the number of “end-of-conversation triggers” has been reduced, which means cases where the Bing AI just stays silent and ends the chat session prematurely (saying something like “Sorry, but I’d rather not continue this conversation”).
Analysis: Bing boosted, but what about Bard?
It’s good to see the number of conversation-ending bugs decreasing, and this is something Microsoft regularly engages in over time, so slowly but surely, the number of times the Bing chatbot rolls over and just closes the session should be getting smaller.
It’s also interesting that Microsoft is gradually honing its Bing AI in specific categories – in this case, recipes and travel, as mentioned, but previously we’ve seen further work on making the chatbot smarter with queries about your area (e.g. nearest grocery store?”, for example). Not to mention improvements on the math front and queries for current (and breaking) news.
There seems to be a lot going on to push Bing AI forward, and we don’t hear nearly as much talk about the progress of Google’s rival AI, Bard. That said, Bard is now starting to receive significant updates – and their full documentation – starting with various performance improvements and increasing the variety of chatbot responses. In short, this is important tinkering, albeit on a basic level, and hopefully Google can build on it significantly.
There’s certainly no shortage of efforts to move forward with Bard from what we’ve heard on the rumor mill, with Google relocating staff to focus on AI (apparently at the expense of Google Assistant).
By Advanced MS user (opens in a new tab)
