Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing Chat now lets you choose ‘precise’ or ‘creative’ answers

Microsoft continues to tweak the AI-powered Bing Chat by adding new features such as the abilty to respond with different ‘tones’.

Over the weekend Micosoft said some users are now able to choose a style for the responses from Bing that are either ‘Precise’, ‘Balanced’ or ‘Creative’. An Microsoft exec tweeted a screen shot with the options which also noted ‘Bing is powered by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible,” and also said: “Make sure to check the facts.”

Also: What is ChatGPT and why does it matter? Here’s everything you need to know

Microsoft released the new Bing with chat features on February 7 and quickly gained over a million people who’d signed up for the waitlist.  

Microsoft hasn’t revealed what version of OpenAI’s GPT large language model it is using. It’s only said that it’s faster, more accurate and “more capable” than ChatGPT or GPT-3.5, the LLM behind ChatGPT. 

The company last week revealed more about how it used its Prometheus AI model to integrate Bing search with its chat features. OpenAI showed Microsoft executives the post-GPT-3.5 model last summer, before Microsoft eventually invested a reported $10 billion in OpenAI.      

According to another Microsoft exec, Bing Chat has now reached version 96 reflecting the amount of effort Microsoft is putting into what has become an unexpected hit. Bing Chat is still in preview, but Microsoft is prioritizing access for Edge users and users with the Bing mobile app. 

Microsoft employee Mikhail Parakhin announced version 96 of Bing Chat via Twitter. 

“OK, it took longer than we initially expected, but finally Bing Chat v96 is fully in production. Give it a try! Now, onto fully shipping the tri-toggle…,” tweeted Parakhin.

Besides the tri-toggle for Chat modes, the two key improvements are “significant reduction in cases where Bing refuses to reply for no apparent reason” and “reduced instances of hallucination in answers”. 

The company has put in place some limits on chat turns to avoid the model becoming confused and “provoked”. Microsoft started with a limit of five chats after reports of the chatbot’s conversations turning deeply strange, but has since extended the limit to six chats. However, Microsoft intends to expand the daily cap from the current 60 to 100 chats soon.