Microsoft continues to add artificial intelligence features to its Bing search engine, even outside of the GPT-powered chat features it offers. According to a feature recap blog post, Bing will now “create AI-generated stories” for certain searches, giving you a little multimedia presentation about the thing you searched for. The company claims it’s a way to let you “consume bite-sized information” while researching certain topics.
The stories look like the ones you’ll find on social media platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, with a progress bar to tell you when it’s going to move on to the next slide. The slides contain text explaining what you searched for, as well as related images and videos. You can also re-enable the story to have a voice read the text to you, with background music.
Stories don’t show up in all searches – when a colleague and I tried it, we brought them up when we searched for ‘cubism’, ‘impressionism’ and ‘tai chi’, but not for terms like “iPhone”, “Apple” or “Top Spokane Restaurants”. To be fair, not all searches need a story; if I’m just looking for dinner, I don’t think I’d like a vote robot reads the story of my local food scene.
Microsoft says the stories will be available to people searching in English, French, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Arabic.
The company also announced that it is upgrading the “knowledge cards” that display to the right of search results, saying it “has expanded the richness and breadth of knowledge cards supported by Bing using generative AI”. Maps can include their own stories (I searched for Seattle, and it came up with two stories) as well as things like timelines about a country, city, or the history of an event.
