Bing gets turn counter, chat tones, improvements this week

This week has been eventful for Bing, thanks to the recent improvements and new features Microsoft injected into it, including the new user response counter and chat tones.

Weeks ago, Microsoft encountered a huge issue regarding its chatbot that seemed to misbehave during interactions with different users. The Redmond company explained that a long conversation could confuse the bot and decided to limit the queries it could receive. As such, users now have to refresh the conversation once the limit is reached, but this poses a problem with keeping track of the number of queries. Thankfully, this is over in the latest update made by Microsoft. Users can now see a counter in the Bing chatbot responses, complete with light signals to alarm them when they are about to reach the limit. Moreover, also now have eight turns before Bing informs them to refresh the conversation.

Microsoft also rolled out chat tone settings for Bing this week. According to Mike Davidson, Corporate Vice President of Design & Research at Microsoft, this is now rolled out to everyone on the new Bing. Using this feature, users can choose between three tones that will change the chat behavior of the chatbot to “Precise,” “Creative,” and “Balanced.”

On the other hand, Microsoft said it also made additional improvements to Bing this week to address some small issues regarding its recent performance. For instance, Bing encountered problems with not being able to recognize page context when using the chatbot built into the Edge Dev channel for Windows. Microsoft said it was addressed “for most scenarios” in the recent update.

Meanwhile, as Microsoft continues to improve Bing’s chatbot, its behavior has also been enhanced to prevent “unnecessarily constrained responses” or make them “appear defensive or adversarial.”