In efforts to boost competitiveness against search goliath Google, Microsoft has sought to make Bing smarter by introducing AI-powered features.
The updates to Bing were announced at an AI event in San Francisco, alongside additional enhancements to Cortana, Office 365 and new partnerships with Reddit.
Introducing AI to Bing aims to bring more intelligent results to searches, with machine learning helping to deliver more relevant and accurate insights into any topic. Additionally, Microsoft aims to improve natural language searches and image handling.
As well as bringing more intelligent, relevant searches to users, the use of AI increases the speed at which results are formulated.
New AI-powered features added to Bing include Intelligent Answers, Advanced Image Search, and Conversational Search – all of which leverage AI to provide the most relevant results and search capabilities.
Intelligent Answers, for example, will leverage the latest state of the art in machine reading comprehension, backed by Project Brainwave running on Intel’s FPGAs, to read and analyze billions of documents to understand the web and help you more quickly and confidently get the answers you need.
Bing will use deep neural networks to validate answers by aggregating across multiple reputable sources, rather than just one, so users can feel more confident in their search results.
Microsoft has also boosted Bing’s capabilities through a partnership with Reddit, which is again designed to boost the search engine’s responses. The partnership will see features such as Reddit Forum Search, bringing the perspectives of various stories to the reader in one place.
Bing was not the only feature that got an upgrade of AI capabilities as Microsoft boosted Cortana’s ability as well as Office 365.
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Within Office 365, AI capabilities will allow users to find content from multiple documents, as well as improvements to Word with better editing suggestions and corrections. Excel, meanwhile, will offer more extensive reporting capabilities. Outlook’s capabilities have also been improved with AI and machine learning across searching and scheduling.
Cortana has been improved with new capabilities such as improved speech and scheduling abilities, in addition to third-party skills and applications being integrated into the system.
