What you need to know
- Microsoft has announced that Bing Chat is getting support for third-party plugins.
- OpenTable and Wolfram|Alpha will be the first plugins available.
- Developers will be able to create third-party plugins.
Microsoft has today announced new features and changes coming soon to Bing Chat that are designed to enhance the service with more features and a better user experience. Alongside these announcements, the company has confirmed that Bing Chat is getting support for third-party plugins that will expand the capabilities of Bing Chat significantly.
Developers will be able to build their own plugins for Bing Chat, and Microsoft says it's working with OpenAI to create an easy and consistent process for building plugins for both ChatGPT and Bing Chat. In fact, Microsoft highlights OpenTable and Wolfram|Alpha as two plugins that will work on Bing Chat, which just also happen to already be available on OpenAI's GPT-4.
The company says it will share more about the Bing Chat platform for developers at Build 2023, which is taking place on May 23-24. From the announcement post, Microsoft CVP Yusef Mehdi said the following:
"We’ll soon build third-party plug-ins into the Bing chat experience creating a platform for developers. For example, if you’re researching the latest restaurant for dinner in Bing chat, it will leverage OpenTable to help you find and book a reservation. Or, with Wolfram|Alpha, you can create powerful visualizations and get answers to complex science, math and human-curated data-based questions directly from Bing chat.
We are working with our partners at OpenAI to make it easier and as consistent as possible for developers to take advantage of this opportunity. We believe this is a game-changer in the reinvention of search and to advance opportunities for developers in search. We look forward to sharing more details at Microsoft Build later this month."
Microsoft has made significant strides in the development of Bing Chat since it launched back in February. Starting today, Bing Chat is no longer in limited preview, meaning anyone can sign-in to a Microsoft account and access the Bing Chat experience without being placed on a waitlist first. This is a huge milestone for Microsoft, and should allow more people the chance to try Bing AI.
The company has also announced new features, including updated visual capabilities such as graphs, charts, and updated formatting with richer and visual answers. Bing Chat is also being better integrated with Microsoft Edge, with the Bing website now being able to hand-off to Edge when navigating beyond the Chat interface, thanks to the ability to now remember chat history across sessions.
