The next big Bing Chat update could include experimental support for third party...

The next big Bing Chat update could include experimental support for third party browsers

Microsoft announced some new features that are coming to Bing Chat last week at its Build 2023 developers conference. That includes support for adding third-party plugins from a wide variety of partners. As it turns out, the Bing Chat team is preparing to add support for those plugins as part of a major update sometime in June.

Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, gave us that info when he responded to a couple of our questions about Bing Chat improvements via Twitter. He stated:

The largest change by far is a big internals refactoring in preparation for the large-scale plugin rollout. We are turning everything into a plugin (including different facets of Search!) - and it results in a very significant metrics improvement.

In a follow-up message, Parakhin stated that Bing Chat will also be adding "larger context size" for users in the chatbot's Balanced mode. In addition, he said we can expect "big improvements in disengagement rate (especially for code writing)" which will be welcome for programmers who are using Bing Chat with help in that area.

He also indicated there will be some improvements made to Bing Image Creator, Microsoft's AI-based art tool, but details about those improvements have yet to be revealed. During Build 2023, Microsoft said Bing Image Creator would soon add a way to tag any images and video with metadata so they can be quickly identified as being AI-generated.

Finally, Parakhin stated that the Bing Chat updates in June could "hopefully" see the "first experiments in enabling third-party browsers." That would certainly be a big game changer for Bing Chat as it is currently limited to just Microsoft Edge on PCs. Adding support for other browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and others will certainly help to open up the chatbot to many more users.