Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot is now open to everyone

Starting today, Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot service is available to anyone to use. The dreaded waitlist is going away and, personally, I couldn’t be happier.

Similar to ChatGPT, Bing chatbot works by drawing information from the world wide web. All you have to do is ask it a question and you’ll receive a human-like response (albeit of potentially questionable accuracy). The whole thing is powered by GPT-4, which is a language model created by OpenAI. To access the chatbot, just sign in to the new Bing with your Microsoft credentials and then you’ll have immediate access to the open preview version. Easy as pie, right?

Bing Chat is getting a hefty update, too. The chatbot will feature image and video answers, chat history, restaurant bookings with OpenTable, more Edge integration and plug-in support, and so on. I’m more of a visual person, so the idea of a chatbot responding with images and video is cool. Sometimes an image is worth more than a thousand words… or something.

The most prominent upgrade is the Actions feature, which you can use in both Edge and Bing. This upgrade has the AI performing tasks without jumping between the two sites. For example, if you ask the chatbot to recommend a new restaurant, it will bring up reservation times and then help you book it. I’m all about convenience and streamlining tasks, so this news is exciting to me. For more information, check out the video below.

Further reading: ChatGPT vs. Bing Chat vs. Google Bard: Which is best?

Microsoft will likely share more at their Build conference, which is happening later this month.