Microsoft’s new Bing is now on Skype and mobile — with a voice

• The new Bing is now available on iOS and Android through Microsoft’s Edge browser, and users can engage with it in all the same ways as they do from the desktop.
• As for Skype, users can voice prompt Microsoft’s Bing to answer questions and provide information during a call or video session.
• Microsoft also boasts that its new AI-powered Bing is fluent in more than 100 languages and can translate between them.

The last two weeks have been pretty influential for Microsoft. The software giant breathed new life into its search engine, Bing, by integrating ChatGPT, the viral chatbot from artificial intelligence (AI) start-up OpenAI, sparking a renewed battle for AI supremacy among tech giants and recreating the way people use search engines. It has been quite a ride for Microsoft ever since, with a few tweaks here and there, and the software giant is far from done.

Recently, Microsoft announced that it is bringing its new AI-powered Bing to mobile and Skype, its proprietary telecommunications application. Incorporating the new Bing into Microsoft’s Edge browser for Android and iOS is unsurprising. The company, after all, provides users who install the mobile Bing app priority on its waitlist for access to the new feature.

“We’re beginning to roll out the incredible capabilities of the new Bing and Edge on your smartphone along with some exciting new features, such as voice input,” Microsoft said in a blog post recently. By tapping the Bing icon at the bottom, the company said it would invoke a chat session, where users can engage in all the same ways they can from the desktop.

“Ask simple or complex questions and receive answers and citations. Choose how you want your answers displayed – bullet points, text, or simplified responses,” Microsoft shared, adding that they have added one of the preview community’s most requested features – voice. For those currently on the Microsoft Bing preview experience, the new features have been available since February 22.

“In the first few days of testing these mobile experiences, you may occasionally find connectivity issues in low-bandwidth situations. We’re aware of the issue and are working on a fix,” the blog post highlighted. The software giant also noted that they had welcomed more than one million people in 169 countries off the waitlist into the preview.

“Feedback on the new capabilities is positive, with 71% of testers giving the new Bing a “thumbs up” on the new search and answers capabilities. We’re even more excited about the breadth of feedback we are receiving on where and how we can improve, and we are acting on it with regular updates,” Microsoft noted.

What came as a surprise was the Skype integration. “Simply add Bing to the group, as you would any Skype contact, and now you can ask Bing to answer questions and provide information for the entire group,” Microsoft shared in the same blog post. Skype has been around for almost two decades, and today it serves 36 million daily users, according to the company.

“Fluent in more than 100 languages and capable of translating between them, Bing can offer unique value to this global communications tool,” Microsoft added. The AI-powered Bing for Skype has been made available this week, and the company envisions bringing it to other communications apps, like Teams, in the future.

Before introducing the Bing preview experience on Bing and Edge Mobile apps and Skype, Microsoft changed its Bing AI chatbot. It limited Bing chats to five questions per session and 50 questions daily. “As we mentioned recently, very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing,” Microsoft said in a blog post recently.

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