Bing Chat can return images and videos now
Microsoft has integrated image and video chat search options into Bing Chat. The AI may return images or videos directly in the search results, adding even more capabilities to Bing Chat.
When Bing Chat users searched for images or video explicitly previously, e.g., by asking Bing Chat to show them images about dogs or cats, Bing Chat could not comply. It did return a few website links that contained images about the topic, but itself returned only text.
This is a thing of the past. Microsoft announced that it is rolling out Image and Video Search to Bing Chat: "We integrated image and video search into Bing chat. You’ll see these results appear as answer cards below your chat answers, and you can click “See more” if you want to explore further in Bing image search."
A basic query that Bing Chat users may use is "show me images of", or "show me a video of". If the feature is unlocked for the account, Bing Chat should return image thumbnails for image searches and a preview video as well as several other video thumbnails for video searches.
Here is how this looks like.
Both image and video search get the information from Bing. When you run the same search on Bing Images or Bing Videos, you get the same results.
Image results may be refined with a click on tags displayed at the top of the results. For cats, users could choose to only display baby cats, illustrations or art, among other options. Video results do not have these options.
Bing Chat may combine text and chat responses, but these are always separated in the results. When asked to show a picture of a combustion engine and explain its main parts, Bing Chat provided a list of the main parts of a combustion engine first and then, in a second reply, diagrams of combustion engines.
A combined answer, one that shows an image at the top and then text that explains that particular image, would be more useful to many users.
The ability to return image and video results is still a welcome addition. While it is for the most part just a copy of Bing's media search capabilities, it is likely that Microsoft is going to expand the abilities of Bing Chat further in the future.
Bing Chat won't return age-restricted content, unlike Bing Image and Bing Video search, which may.
For now, it may help Bing Chat users get visual results without having to leave the Chat interface.
Microsoft announced at the same time that it has increased Bing Chat limits to 20 turns per session and 200 turns per day. A turn consists of a user query and an answer by Bing Chat. The previous limits were 15 turns per session and 150 turns per day.
Now You: what would you like to see supported by Bing Chat or other AIs?
