How Microsoft’s Bing Chat Upgrade Turns Search into an AI Copilot

Microsoft Opens BingChat to Everyone

Microsoft announced that BingChat is now fully open to all users without waiting, requiring only a Microsoft account to access the service on the homepage.

We view it as your Web Copilot (Your Copilot for the Web).

The update is described as the next generation of AI‑driven search, aiming to transform the largest software category—search—through extensive feature expansions.

Four Major Updates

From pure text search to multimodal answers.

Bing Image Creator now supports many languages.

Chat history feature added.

Support for plugins.

Multimodal Answer Capability

Users can ask Bing to find images, such as "Elon Musk memes," and Bing retrieves the images, provides source information, and displays them directly in the chat.

Both images and videos appear in responses, automatically categorized into long‑form and short‑form video sections.

Bing Image Creator Upgrade

The Image Creator, based on the DALL·E model, is now available to everyone and supports Chinese dialogue. It has been expanded to over 100 languages, allowing users to generate images in their native language.

Generate a "red‑braised lion’s head" image.

Initial attempts struggled with complex dishes, but adding simple elements like cilantro succeeded.

Chat History Feature

Bing now displays conversation history in the upper‑right corner of the page, allowing users to revisit past dialogs. Microsoft plans to enable export and sharing of chat records, preserving formatting for easy copying.

Future updates will improve summarization of long documents (PDFs, websites) and allow AI to perform more tasks with fewer user actions, such as finding and playing movies.

Plugin Support

Microsoft announced upcoming plugin functionality. Plugins like OpenTable could help users book restaurants, while Wolfram|Alpha could provide data visualizations and complex analysis directly within Bing chats.

Weekly Updates and Usage Statistics

Microsoft commits to weekly updates based on user feedback. In the 90 days since the BingChat update, over 1 billion chats have occurred, with more than 200 million images generated via Image Creator. Bing’s daily active users exceed 100 million, and the app’s installations have quadrupled.

The goal is to address the problem that nearly half of web searches receive no satisfactory answer, leveraging the GPT‑4 partnership to fundamentally change information retrieval.

Microsoft is shifting from a product to an ecosystem.

Industry observers note the intensifying competition between Microsoft and OpenAI, with speculation about potential acquisitions and the broader impact on AI‑driven search.

Despite the extensive feature rollout, some users remain skeptical, pointing out that added functionalities alone may not persuade them to switch from ChatGPT, and highlighting limitations such as Bing’s availability only in Edge.