Microsoft is testing new Bing AI personas as they enable longer conversations

Microsoft said it’s extending the length of chats people can have with the test version of its Bing AI, while the company also began testing different “tone” personalities for more specific or creative responses. The company’s decisions follow efforts to restrict access to the technology after media coverage of the artificial intelligence chat app went off the rails went viral last week.

Bing Chat can now answer up to six consecutive questions or statements per conversation, after which people will have to start a new topic, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. Microsoft previously imposed a conversation limit of five replies, with a maximum of 50 total interactions per day. Microsoft said it will now allow 60 total interactions per day and plans to increase that total to 100 “soon”.

Microsoft also said it’s testing options for users to choose the tone of their conversations, whether they prefer Bing to be more specific in its responses, more creative, or somewhere in between.

Ultimately, the tech giant said it hopes to enable longer and more complex conversations over time, but wants to do so “responsibly”.

“The very reason we’re testing the new Bing out in the open with a limited set of pre-release testers is precisely to find those atypical use cases from which we can learn and improve the product,” said the company in a press release.

Microsoft’s moves mark the latest twist for its sensational Bing AI chatbot when it was announced earlier this month. The technology combines Microsoft’s less popular Bing search engine with OpenAI startup technologywhose ChatGPT answers prompts for everything from being asked to write a poem to helping write code and even daily calculations to figure out how many bags can fit in a car.

Experts believe that this new type of technology, called “generative AI”, has the potential to remake the how we interact with technology. Microsoft, for example, demonstrated how its Bing AI could help someone plan a day-to-day vacation with relative ease.

Last week, however, critics raised concerns that Microsoft’s Bing AI might not be ready for prime time. People with early access started posting bizarre responses the system gave them, including Bing telling a New York Times columnist to give up on his marriage, and the AI ​​demanding an apology from a Reddit user. to find out if we were in 2022 or 2023.

Microsoft said the “long and complex” chat sessions that elicited many unusual responses were “not something we would typically find with internal testing.” But he hopes improvements to the program, including its potential new tone choice for responses, will help give people “more control over the type of chat behavior to best suit” their needs.

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