Microsoft is wasting no time bringing its new AI-powered Bing to all of its products. After introducing it in its Edge browser and then bringing it to the Edge, Bing, and Skype apps on mobile, it is now the turn of Windows 11 to welcome the new Bing to its taskbar.
This is part of a major Windows 11 update that also includes the first preview of Phone Link for iOS, which will allow you to take calls and respond to messages from your iPhone on your Windows PC, tabs in the default Notepad app, new energy recommendations, a redesigned Quick Assist app to make it easier to remotely assist your parents with their computer problems, and other features.
If you’ve used Windows 11, you’re probably familiar with the search box that’s built into the taskbar by default. That is now where you will find the new Bing, ready to answer your questions but unwilling to talk about itself.
According to Microsoft, the search box is one of the most popular features in Windows, with over 500 million monthly users.
That is a prominent placement for the new Bing. Indeed, with a low single-digit market share, the Bing search engine is likely to have fewer monthly users. To use the new Bing, you must first join the waitlist, so not every Windows 11 user will have immediate access.
It’s no secret that Microsoft has faced a lot of criticism since the launch of Bing earlier this month. In many ways, this felt like a hurried release, but to Microsoft’s credit, many of the bugs discovered by Bing’s early users have since been fixed.
It’s also one thing to use the Bing chatbot to elicit an adversarial response from it, but it’s an entirely different experience to use it to assist with day-to-day searches. However, we need to investigate the edge cases, and Microsoft should have done more of that before launching it.
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