Microsoft has introduced a new Bing feature that is available in the Bing mobile app and through Microsoft’s Edge browser for Android and iOS.
The new Bing features will enable users to use voice input to interact with Bing’s chat mode. Also new is an integration with Skype, Microsoft’s messaging app, which will now allow you to bring Bing into a text conversation to add additional information.
The fact that Microsoft is bringing the new Bing to mobile isn’t exactly a surprise. The company, after all, gives users who install the mobile Bing app priority on its waitlist for gaining access to the new features. The Skype integration wasn’t necessarily on everybody’s radar, though, in part because it often feels like Microsoft has forgotten about Skype, even though the service still has 36 million daily users, according to the company.
With this new integration, users can add Bing to any chat and ask it the same kinds of questions you would ask in the regular chat mode.
As for the mobile app, there is an addition of voice search, which will enable users to dictate their questions, and Bing will also use Microsoft’s text-to-speech technology to read the answer back to you. We will still have to see what Bing sounds like, though. Microsoft gave up on its Cortana voice assistant in recent years (and Bing specifically notes that it is “not an assistant”), but there can be little doubt that these large language models make a compelling use case for voice assistants, which have long waited for a killer feature beyond setting timers.
