Microsoft’s Bing Chat A.I. bot now lets you search using images

Microsoft on Tuesday introduced a big replace to its synthetic intelligence chatbot: visible search. Users can now take or add a photograph to Bing Chat and ask for extra data on it by way of the desktop or Bing apps.

“Bing can understand the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it,” Microsoft wrote in a launch. “Whether you’re traveling to a new city on vacation and asking about the architecture of a particular building or at home trying to come up with lunch ideas based on the contents of your fridge, upload the image into Bing Chat and use it to harness the web’s knowledge to get you answers.”

The replace comes because the AI arms race heats up amongst chatbot leaders like Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. In the hassle to develop essentially the most superior generative AI, tech giants are shortly launching new options, aiming to maintain up with not solely their text-based chatbot rivals, but in addition image-heavy AI instruments.

Although picture search — and responses that embody photos — at the moment are turning into a part of the consumer expertise for chatbots, not one of the main text-based chatbots appear to have the ability to generate their very own photos but, in contrast to instruments like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2. However, Google says the characteristic is on the way in which for its Bard chatbot.

Microsoft’s choice to permit photos for Bing Chat follows Google’s current debut of a picture search characteristic for Bard, its AI chatbot. Using Google Lens, customers can request data from Bard about a picture they’ve uploaded, ask it to generate a caption and even simply add some zest to the chatbot’s responses, comparable to a request for restaurant suggestions with photographs of the restaurant’s interiors included. At the time of writing, OpenAI’s ChatGPT doesn’t permit picture uploads, because the chatbot remains to be fully text-based, and Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude 2, operates equally.