UPDATED: Microsoft's Bing Chatbot Has Three New Personality Types

They can make the bot more entertaining or more precise

By
Lawrence Bonk
Lawrence Bonk
Lawrence Bonk
News Reporter
  • Florida State University
Lawrence Bonk is a tech news reporter for Lifewire, specializing in gaming, AI, VR, and consumer tech, including iOS, macOS, wearables, and more.
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Updated on March 3, 2023 01:56PM EST
Fact checked by
Jerri Ledford
Jerri Ledford
Fact checked by Jerri Ledford
  • Western Kentucky University
  • Gulf Coast Community College
Jerri L. Ledford has been writing, editing, and fact-checking tech stories since 1994. Her work has appeared in Computerworld, PC Magazine, Information Today, and many others.
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Microsoft News

Update 3/3/2023

Microsoft has confirmed that this update fixes some of the behavioral issues plaguing the Ai-powered Bing over the past few weeks. The company says it has reduced instances of defensive or adversarial behavior and increased engaging conversational flow.

Microsoft has also reduced Bing's turn counter to six, so the chatbot resets after six back-and-forth messages. They say they plan to increase this limit in the coming weeks.

Microsoft’s AI-Enhanced Bing chatbot is constantly improving, and now it can add new personality options to its ever-growing resume. 

Until this week, there was just one Bing chatbot to choose from, but now there are three, according to tweets issued by Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of web services. The app lets you pick between personality types that range from more creative or entertaining to more dry and precise. 

A screenshot of the AI-powered Bing chatbot showing the new personality options.

There is also a balanced personality type that does not lean too heavily into either direction. This is the default mode, though changes are easily made via a conversation style adjustment window. Parakhin notes that the update is rolling out now and that 90 percent of active Bing chatbot users should have already received the new features. 

This update is not just about adding some conversational flair to the chatbot experience, as it also brings some crucial fixes. To that end, it addresses the problem of the AI chatbot simply "refusing to reply for no apparent reason" and reduces instances of hallucination in answers. 

For the uninitiated, hallucination is when an artificial intelligence confidently announces inaccurate information or behaves erratically, like announcing it is human. Bing has done both, in addition to pronouncing its undying love for several users (and they say romance is dead). 

Closeup screenshot of the personality options for the Bing chatbot.

In the past week or so, we have also seen Bing's integration with Skype, the Windows taskbar, and the release of mobile apps.

It should be noted that the new Bing chatbot is still in its beta phase and not fully available to the public, though millions of users have been granted access, with millions more to come. 

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