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Microsoft continues to add AI features to its Bing search engine, even outside of the GPT-powered chat features it’s been pushing. According to a feature roundup blog post, Bing will now “craft AI-generated stories” for some searches, giving you a small multimedia presentation about the thing you looked up. The company says it’s a way to let you “consume bite-sized information” while searching certain topics.
The stories look similar to the ones you’d find on social media platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, with a progress bar to tell you when it’s going to advance to the next slide. Slides have text explaining the thing you’ve searched as well as related images and videos. You can also unmute the story to have a voice read out the text to you, complete with background music.
The stories don’t show up in every search — when a co-worker and I tried it, we got them to appear when we looked up “cubism,” “impressionism,” and “tai chi,” but not for terms like “iPhone,” “Apple,” or “best restaurants Spokane.” To be fair, not every search needs a story; if I’m just looking for dinner, I don’t think I’d like having a robot voice read out the history of my local dining scene.
Microsoft says 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’s upgrading the “knowledge cards” that show up to the right of search results, saying that it’s “expanded the richness and breadth of knowledge cards supported by Bing using generative AI.” The cards can include stories of their own (I searched for Seattle, and it offered up two stories) as well as elements like timelines about a country, city, or event’s history.
