Microsoft reported a significant update to its artificial intelligence chatbot, defined search

July 20, 2023: On Tuesday, Microsoft reported a significant update to its artificial intelligence chatbot, defined search. Users can now take or upload photos to Bing Chat and ask for more details through the desktop or Bing apps.

“Bing can understand the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it,” Microsoft noted in a disclaimer. “Whether you’re traveling to a new city on holiday and asking about the architecture of a particular building or at home attempting to come up with lunch ideas based on the contents of your fridge, upload the image into Bing Chat and use it to harness the web’s ability to get you answers.”

The update comes as the A.I. components race heats up among chatbot leaders like Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. To develop the most advanced generative A.I., tech giants are quickly establishing new features to maintain up with their text-based chatbot competitors and image-heavy A.I. tools.

Although image search and responses that include images are now becoming part of the user experience for chatbots, none of the leading text-based chatbots can create their images yet, unlike tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2. However, Google says the feature is on the way for its Bard chatbot.

Microsoft’s decision to let images for Bing Chat follows Google’s recent debut of an image tracking feature for Bard, its A.I. chatbot. Using Google Lens, users can request information from Bard about an image they’ve uploaded, ask it to generate a caption, or even add some zest to the chatbot’s answers, such as a request for restaurant recommendations with photos of the cafe’s interiors included.

At the time of writing, OpenAI’s ChatGPT does not allow photo uploads, as the chatbot is still wholly text-based, and Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude 2, operates similarly.