Microsoft will limit the duration of Bing Chatbot conversations

Microsoft will begin limiting conversations with the new chatbot in its Bing search engine to five questions per session and 50 questions per day, the company announced Friday.

Microsoft released a new version of Bing, which combines the search engine with artificial intelligence technology built by OpenAI, a San Francisco startup, to much fanfare during an event at its campus in Redmond, Washington, he less than two weeks ago.

A number of other big tech companies, including Google, are working on similar services. But Microsoft moved quickly to gain a technological advantage over competitors, and the company promised that AI would eventually be integrated into a wide range of its products.

Microsoft expected its chatbot to sometimes respond inaccurately, and it built in measures to protect against people trying to get the chatbot to behave strangely or say harmful things. Still, early adopters who had open personal conversations with the chatbot found its responses unusual — and sometimes frightening.

Now users will be prompted to start a new session after asking five questions and the chatbot will have answered five times.

“Very long chat sessions can disrupt the underlying chat model,” Microsoft said on Friday.

The company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that it “does not fully consider ‘people using the chatbot’ for more general discovery of the world and for social entertainment.” The chatbot became repetitive and, at times, irritable in long conversations, he said.

Microsoft said its data showed about 1% of conversations with the chatbot contained more than 50 messages. He said he would consider increasing the question limits in the future. The company is also planning to add tools to give users more control over the tone of the chatbot.